Full text of "Visions"
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VISIONS
VISIONS
COULSON
KERNAHAN
LONDON: HODDER AND STOUGHTON
27 PATERNOSTER ROW. 1905
FIRST EDITION, October, 1905.
SECOND EDITION, November, 1905.
TO
J. E. HODDER WILLIAMS
PUBLISHER
MY FRIEND AND FELLOW-CRAFTSMAN
855252
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
TV j\ R. KERNAHAN'S imaginative work
has attracted such unusual attention,
and has been so widely circulated that his
publishers think the time has come when his
four now-famous religious booklets and the
remainder of his separately published imagina-
tive writings might with advantage be issued
in one volume, especially as they are enabled
to include three entirely new pieces.
"The Lonely God," "A Lost Soul" and
"The Garden of God," all three from A Book
of Strange Sins, are included by kind per-
mission of Messrs. Ward, Lock and Co., the
owners of the copyright.
vn
THE CHILD-FACE
PAGE
I
THE DREAM OF THE DEAD FOLK . 19
GOD AND THE ANT .
35
THE HEAVENLY GRAFTING
61
THE FACE BEYOND THE DOOR . . 67
THE GARDEN OF GOD
ix
153
Contents
PACK
THE CHILD, THE WISE MAN AND THE
DEVIL 169
A LOST SOUL . 213
THE LONELY GOD . . . 225
A WORLD WITHOUT A CHILD . . 237
/ have looked on Life : I have looked on
Death. I have pitied, / have sorrowed^ I
have smiled. Yet have I no lore save that
which was learned from flowers and little
children, from loving all God*s creatures, and
from seeing^ in my visions, the Sorrowful
Face.
XI
THE^CHILD
RACE
B
THE@CHIL,DFACE
WHAT a little thing to set a strong
man's heart a-thump ! Just a wee
sound half sigh, half cry from the
cot where a child stirs in her sleep. It was
not even a troubled cry. It was like the un-
considered, unconscious " chirrup " of some
small bird that wakes in the night to nestle
more snugly under its mother's wing, and
drowses off again even as it chirrups. It was
as if, upon the stilled waters of night, a falling
rose-leaf had set a-stir a scarcely perceptible
ripple. Yet light as is the rose-leafs kiss upon
the water's lips that kiss trembles, halo-wise,
into a circle, the emblem of eternity. And that
child's feeble cry seems to me to be a voice
calling from the eternities that are gone and
from the eternities that are to come.
3
The Child-Face
Listening to that child's cry, I see, standing
behind her, the shadowy line of the unknown
{ *dea J\ jwhp^e: she and I sprang. It is a line
.; which*: tr$t<?hes- away back into the mists of
' the " morning * of the world, when God first
committed the brimming vase of life into the
hands of man, charging him that he and those
who came after him should, generation by
generation, pass on, unspilt, that purple vase
which I, in my turn, have passed on to my
child, and she will one day, I hope, pass on
to hers.
As those ghost voices cry out to me from
the dust, I am aware of strange stirrings in the
blood that flows in my veins and once flowed
in other veins than mine. I am conscious of
blind yearnings, of unyielded obediences, of
unrendered love, and my hands go groping
forth as if to clasp unseen hands that are
stretched to me from impenetrable dark ; even
as now, when I am warm with life, the cold
ghost of me, that is to be, stretches wan hands
of yearning towards my child's unborn chil-
dren whom I may never see.
4
The Child-Face
When I was myself a child I once asked the
meaning of the strange knocking within my
breast, and was told that it came from a glow-
ing forge where a blacksmith plied his hammer
unceasingly upon the anvil. I was told that it
was there the bones for my body were welded ;
it was there that the blood which ran red and
hot like molten metal in my veins was
warmed, and that the rising and falling of
my chest was caused by the constant working
of the big pair of bellows that kept the fire
alight within. I remember that I accepted
the explanation implicitly so implicitly that,
even now, when I hear my own child's cry
in the night, and my heart stands still a
moment to listen, I fancy that for that moment
the blacksmith is poising the withheld hammer
high over his head. Then down it comes
again, with a lustier blow than ever, and the
accustomed and monotonous round goes on
until the day when the hammer shall fall from
the nerveless fingers, the fire shall flicker up
into sudden brightness, and then as suddenly
sink to a thin red line, along which it is chased
5
The Child-Face
to a mere spark, and is finally swallowed up
by pursuing night. And where once there
had been warmth, life, light, and movement,
there shall be only darkness, silence, stillness,
cold cinder, and grey ash.
Sometimes it is a pitiful, frightened little
cry that reaches me, and to-night it is
followed by the pattering of dumpy feet along
the landing. Wee fists assail the panels
of my door, and a quavering treble pipes :
" Fa'ver, I'se afwaid. Let me in ! "
As I hush her in my arms I ask myself
whether it is because God would have us, His
children, to realise the infinite love of the
Divine Father that He, the Creator, permits
His creature to enter into, and in a sense to
share, the mystery of Fatherhood. I look
sometimes into my child's eyes and I ask
myself whether she can read and sound the
depths of love in mine. One day, perhaps,
when she has a child of her own, she will
understand that the mere fact of her room
being next to mine is a happiness to me, and
that my sleep is sweeter because of the sense
6
The Child-Face
of nearness to her. But in the meantime I
often wonder whether as yet she is even if
unconsciously aware of my love, or whether
it is only because I represent to her the
buoyant joys of airy up-tossings, because I am
associated in her thoughts with the eager
interest of new toys, and the thousand and
one devices which I contrive for her entertain-
ment, that she bounds gleefully in her nurse's
arms at sight of me. " Ah, little one ! " I say
to myself. " Perhaps the heart of the Divine
Father may ache as longingly for some sign
of His children's love, as mine is now aching
to be assured of yours. Were I to pass out of
your sight to-morrow, would you forget me as
easily as I forget Him?"
Here I am naturally reminded of Mr.
William Canton's poem on this very subject,
and remembering it I am silenced as by
a rebuke. Instead, therefore, of proffering
copper of my own coining, let me assist to
circulate the fine gold of his. The poem
occurs in " The Invisible Playmate and W. V.,
Her Book," which stands side by side on my
7
The Child-Face
shelf with Mr. Barrie's " Margaret Ogilvy.'
To me it is the " Margaret Ogilvy " of child-
hood, and if out of all the literature of the last
ten years only some half-dozen volumes might
remain, I should certainly plead that these two
be among them.
I have a little maid who, when she leaves
Her father and her father's threshold, grieves,
But being gone, and life all holiday,
Forgets my love and me straightway;
Yet when I write,
Kisses my letters, dancing with delight,
Cries " Dearest father ! " and in all her glee
For one brief live-long hour remembers me.
Shall I in anger punish or reprove?
Nay, this is natural ; she cannot guess
How one forgotten feels forgetfulness ;
And I am glad thinking of her glad face,
And send her little tokens of my love.
And Thou wouldst Thou be wroth in such a case ?
And crying Abba, I am fain
To think no human father's heart
Can be so tender as Thou art,
So quick to feel our love, to feel our pain.
When she is froward, querulous, or wild,
Thou knowest, Abba, how, in each offence,
8
The Child-Face
I stint not patience, lest I wrong the child,
Mistaking for revolt defect of sense,
For wilfulness mere sprightliness ef mind.
Thou know'st how often, seeing I am blind;
How when I turn her face against the wall
And leave her in disgrace,
And will not look at her, or speak at all,
I long to speak and long to see her face;
And how, when twice, for something grievous done
I could but smite, and, though I lightly smote,
I felt my heart rise strangling in my throat;
And when she wept I kissed the poor red hands.
All these things, Father, a father understands;
And am not I Thy son ?
II
I HAVE told you of the thoughts that come
and go in my brain as I lie at night hushing
my frightened child to my breast, and watching
the little eyelids droop over the tired eyes, like
the petals of a primrose, as the sense of sweet
security and loving companionship lulls her
to happy sleep. But the night passes, and it
is she and I who are first out of doors in the
morning to drink in together a deep, delicious
draught of dewy air. There is no such divine
intoxicant as is to be found in the blue chalice
which morning tilts brimming to our lips. To
drink of it is to know why the butterfly
is so merry-mad that he must needs skip and
dance in his flight. It is the magic philtre
which lets us into the secret of bird-song and
flower-speech. At the first draught we are
10
The Child-Face
aware of voices calling to us from the garden.
There is a flutter among the flowers, for the
rose which they have been so long expecting
has arrived with the dawn, and before they
were awake to receive her as became her
state. There she stands damask-red, and
beautiful as some dusky Eastern queen,
and around her the sweet-peas are pouting
their pretty lips, piqued at our delay, the
white pinks are wearing their best frilled
petticoats, and the pansies, aproned in royal
purple, are impatiently awaiting our arrival
that the rose-queen and the child-queen may
be duly presented to each other. Scarcely is
the ceremony over, and formal calls been
made in order of precedence upon the flowers
who form the royal court, before the gong
summons my little maid and me to breakfast,
after which we go our separate ways I to my
work, she to her morning sleep. At luncheon
she sits at my side in her high chair, and if
no morsel is so sweet to the little one as that
which comes off " FaVer's " plate, no meal is so
delightful to him as that which is shared with
ii
The Child-Face
his darling. Then luncheon over and my pipe
smoked out, away we go, she and I, for an
afternoon's holiday - making in the fields.
Sometimes, with hand fast clasped in mine
and face upturned to listen, she trudges along
at my side, all eyes and ears, while I am
weaving " a story " for her. Sometimes she
elects to be perched in masterful ease on my
shoulder ; at others she slips the parental cable
altogether, now lingering behind, now flitting
on in front, now darting bird- like aside at
sight of a butterfly or flower. But whatever
be the way she travel, she is with me, and I
with her, and when that is so, and on such
a day, the very intaking of our breath is a joy.
The sky spreads above us a shimmering sea
of blue not the cool crystalline sapphire of
early morning, but the deep, dense azure of
a midsummer noon. How hot the bees must
feel in that furry coat! As we lie basking
in the sunlight, and watching the buttercups
dancing and dipping above the grass, like
golden banners upborne amid an army of
green-bladed bayonets, we do not wonder, she
12
The Child-Face
and I, that the bees like some one with a
grievance grumble monotonously to them-
selves. We can see the hot air quivering and
simmering above the clover fields, but all else
is drowsily, dreamily still. The streets of the
far-off city are reeking with dusty heat, but
here we are in another world, and the birds
and the butterflies are our brethren. This
meadow is our boundless prairie ; our heads are
below the level of the grass-tops, which spread
filmy arms above us, like the boughs of a
miniature forest.
We love, she and I, to feel the wind upon
our cheek, to hear it, as it whistles by us, sing-
ing in our ears, as in the hollow convolutions of
a shell. We love to look out upon the sea or
upon open plains and broad sky spaces where
there is " eyesight room" and room for our
souls to fare forth into the blue. We love to
lie and listen to the song of the wind among
the pine-trees the "sailing" pine-trees and
to watch them rock and sway like storm-tossed
ships at sea. We love to see the rook beat up
against the wind, and poise and hover and soar,
13
The Child-Face
and slide down upon the edge of the blast
with rigid blade-like wings, that shear like a
knife. As we watch him cut the ether in
circles and half-circles I think of him less
as a bird than as some winged artist of the
heights, who delights in flowing line and
beauty of curve, and to my very limbs is lent
something of the buoyancy of his flight.
By and by we come to that sunny stretch of
meadowland over which the skylark seems
always singing, and where the grass grows so
long that the little ones whom, at almost any
hour of a summer's day, one is sure to see
gathering flowers have to wade, waist high,
as they go. This we call "The Children's
Meadow," because, as I say, one can rarely
pass through it without hearing a psean of
childish laughter just as we have christened
the lane beyond the stile " Lovers' Avenue,"
because on a summer's evening one seldom
passes between the hazel-hedges that over-
arch, bower-wise above, without finding a coy
couple leaning bashfully on the gate, or wander-
ing in front of us in waist-encircled bliss.
The Child-Face
Then we reach the sloping, wind-swept hillside,
where we love to lie and watch the slow sail-
ing of stately clouds over our head, or to listen
to the tinkle of the brooklet purling over the
pebbles in the dell below.
And in my child's joyous wonder at all that
is wonderful in this beautiful world, I forget
the making of books with which my brain is
busied, and when the first flush of rapture is
over and the wee brain has sobered into calm,
I tell her of Him once a little child like her-
self by Whom this beautiful world was made.
Ill
IT is night again, and once more I am with
my child. In the daytime I seem to lose her,
but at night she comes back to me, more mine
than ever. How many times I have tip-toed,
quiet as any mouse, along the passage to her
door and peeped in, just to satisfy myself that
all was well with her.
Do you remember the opening verses of Mr.
Canton's poem, "The Inquisition"?
I woke at dead of night ;
The room was still as death ;
All in the dark I saw a sight
Which made me catch my breath.
Although she slumbered near,
The silence hung so deep,
I leaned above her crib to hear
If it were death or sleep.
16
The Child-Face
How often I have done that ! How often
a cold hand has seemed to shut and hold down
the sluice-gates of my heart, as I saw how
waxen-white was her face, how stony-still her
slumbers. Then a sigh that would scarcely have
stirred a feather, or it may be a twitching of
the wee hand, that lay as if sculptured in marble
outside the coverlet, has brought a " Thank
God ! " to my lips ; the cruel fingers that were
clutching at my heart have relaxed their hold,
letting the up-gathered blood go racing through
my veins again, and I have crept back to the
bed which I had left only in a dream. For the
little face upon which I had looked was a dream
face, a dead face the saddest of all dead faces
the face of the child that never was.
1 7
^ __ mf _ u ^-o-^** s-/ - <J W r *V^^*"^ ^*^^>^--^_ "^V
THESDRJEAIWOF
THEiiDEADiFOLK
THEQDREAM^OF
THESDEADiFOLk,
A MAN lay listening to the cry of the
wind at midnight ; and as he lay, he
fell asleep and dreamt that he was
dying.
Just as upon a map one seeks to trace a
river from its source to its union with the
sea, so he now strove to look back upon his
own life and to see it in perspective.
It had seemed to him like a space set
between two far-removed marks, but now
he saw that every completed human life is
a circle ; and though he realised that none
may see whence the centre of that circle
is taken, he knew that the hand which
holds the compasses is the hand of God.
21
The Dream of the Dead Folk
And the man saw that the arc of his
life was fast rounding to a ring, and as
he drew nearer to what he had thought
was End, he saw that End was already
merging into Beginning.
And then just as the last grain in an
hour-glass runs out the swiftest the remnant
of his strength failed him, and he died.
22
II
SINCE the day when He took our mother
Eve from the side of our father Adam,
God has caused a deep sleep to fall upon
the soul to whom a great change is about
to come.
When the man first awoke from the
sleep into which he had fallen, he knew
that it was night, but he knew not that it
is only the souls of the unhallowed dead
which awake at night, and that the spirits
of those who have passed away in peace
awake greeted by angel-faces in the sun-
light of God's smile, and fare forth, com-
panioned by rejoicing dear ones, among the
flowers, the fields, and the happy birds.
But just as the feeble hands of a newly-
born babe grope unconsciously for the
23
The Dream of the Dead Folk
warm bosom under which the little one
has long lain so the poor human soul that
awakes, naked and cold from the birth-
change which we call death, cries out for the
touch of a familiar hand, the consolation of
familiar companionship.
When a child awakes, screaming from an
evil dream, no assurance of mother or nurse
can dispel the illusion so quickly as a sight
of the streaming morning sunshine, for then
the child knows not only that the imagined
monsters of the night are gone, but that they
had never existed, and never could exist, except
in a dream.
But when the man awoke it seemed to him
so terrible was the sense of evil which hung
over him as if the awakening had come, not
to dispel the spectres of sleep, but to make
possible and present the impossible horrors of
his most hideous dreams.
Fear, abject and craven, crouched cowering
at his heart fear of himself, fear of the
perpetual and imprisoning dark, and fear of
the mocking shapes that the darkness hid.
2 4
The Dream of the Dead Folk
But most of all he feared to be alone, for
henceforth he knew that he was deserted of
God that where he was, God was not.
If of the living it has been said that solitude,
the withdrawal of oneself from the world,
is strength-giving, but that loneliness is the
horror of horrors, what shall be said of the
loneliness of the dead?
For the living know not what loneliness is.
Where life is, there God is, and where God is,
none is alone.
But when a naked human soul drifts out
on death's tide to that region of outer dark
which is emptied of God, then is that soul
confronted with the Loneliness.
Ill
WHEN the man was in the body, all things
were measured and compelled by his body's
needs.
"I must have warmth, for I am cold," he
had said ; " I must eat, for I am hungry ;
must drink, for I am thirsty ; must sleep, for
I am tired."
Now that he was no longer in the body,
heat and cold, hunger and thirst, wakeful-
ness and weariness, could affect him never
again.
But more cruel than the pangs and slow
wasting of hunger, more torturing than the
searing and blistering of live flesh by fire,
more terrible than the throes of those who,
with lolling tongues dry and swollen as puff-
balls, drop on the desert sands to die of thirst,
26
The Dream of the Dead Folk
were the loneliness and the fear of loneliness
which lay upon the soul of the man.
And in that awful moment he thought of the
mother whom he had left on earth, the mother
to whom, as a child, he had fled in his every
sorrow, the mother to whom, even as a man,
he had never gone for solace in vain.
And as he so thought, lo ! he saw his mother
before him. With a cry of joy, he flung
himself on his knees beside her, burying his
head in her lap, and crying piteously :
" Mother, mother ! It is your son ! "
But no loving hand was laid upon his head,
no loving word was whispered in his ear, and
when the man looked into his mother's eyes,
he saw that there was no recognition in
them.
Then, pressing a pleading hand upon hers,
again the man cried out to his mother to
comfort him, and again he saw that she sat
impassive and unseeing, and, though her lips
moved placidly, 'twas but to count the stitches
in the work that she held in her hand.
Then the man thought of the wife he loved,
27
The Dream of the Dead Folk
the mother of his children ; but when he
sought her presence, he saw that beside her
was one who was whispering words of love in
her ear, and the man knew that already he
was replaced in his wife's heart.
And, though he called her by name, she,
unhearing and unheeding, turned away with
laughing eyes, and kissed the lips of the lover
who stood by her side.
Then the man thought of the child that he
had loved better than he had loved his life,
and, as he so thought, the child lay sleeping in
its cot before him. And the man bent over
the child, calling it by every dear, familiar
name ; but the child stirred not, nor even so
much as smiled in its sleep.
Then the soul of the man turned colder
than the clay semblance of himself which
lay mouldering in the churchyard.
He knew now that he was alone indeed, for
he knew that he was dead, and that in the
kingdom of outer dark, the dead seek no com-
panionship with the dead.
It is from the living the lords of life that
28
The Dream of the Dead Folk
the lonely dead folk crave the companionship
which can never be theirs.
To no living ear are dead voices audible, by
no living eyes are dead shapes seen, and
though the dead may go to the living though
they cannot help but go to the living they
may not by so much as a word, by so much as
some old familiar household sign, make known
their presence and their needs to the happy
live folk who stand in the sun.
Else were the joy of life for ever gone, for
could the live folk see but once the piteous
spectres mendicants of a moment's com-
panionship that throng the way, as figures
throng a church door ; the stricken shapes
that crawl like dogs to their feet, craving the
solace of a single recognising look ; the
haggard hunted faces that people the dark ;
the imploring arms outstretched on every side
could the live folk see all this, then were life
no longer a lordly palace, but a leper house.
But for the dead folk, the live folk have no
eyes, for the dead folk the live folk have no
ears, and soon those pallid shapes, aweary of
29
The Dream of the Dead Folk
waiting for the look, the word, the caress that
never come, pass out, the prey of utter hope-
lessness, into the night only again to return
to the presence of the living, again to urge
their unavailing prayers, and again to be
driven forth of despair into the night.
IV
EVEN so the soul of the man fled forth from
the presence of the loved ones out of whose
lives he had for ever passed.
And as he fled, a thousand menacing
shapes sprang up to gibber, ape-like, at him
ere they, too, were swallowed up of night.
And as they shrank from him, so the man
shrank from them ; for in the realm of outer
dark, the shapes that flit athwart the gloom
go lonely as lepers, who, unclean themselves,
see only in others their own uncleanliness, and
so come to loathe and to fear each other, even
as they loathe and fear themselves.
Then more poignant than the longing of
a mother for her dead child, more irresistible
than the lust of a drunkard for drink, more
desperate than the soldier's last fight for dear
3 1
The Dream of the Dead Folk
life the cruel, crushing fear of his incom-
municable loneliness came over the man. And
ever he pressed on panic-stricken into the
night, and ever he was pursued as by ravening
wolves by the fear that lurked at his heart.
And as he fled he was aware of the rising
of the wind ; and he was aware, too, that just
as a tempest lashes the surface of the sea into
angry and contending waves, so the wind, as
it gathered in strength, was lashing into blind
hate his own soul, and the souls of them that
peopled the outer dark.
He still feared and shrank from the shapes
that he saw around, just as they feared and
shrank from him, but he knew that in them, as
in him, every gust that blew was goading fear
into ungovernable and murderous fury, and
that soon, like caged lions, which, chafing at
imprisonment, turn the one to rend the other,
so he and they would soon be at each other's
throats.
Then in that domain of darkness the man
heard the wind's bugle-call to battle, and saw
the rabble of the dead massing into devil-led
32
The Dream of the Dead Folk
legions, that hurled themselves the one upon
the other in bloody and insatiate hate.
And with a great cry the man awoke, and
knew that he had been dreaming.
The casement stood open, and as he heard
the wind sweep past like charging cavalry, he
thought of the contending cohorts of the
damned, and the man knelt by the window to
breathe a prayer for the souls in outer dark.
Then suddenly the wind dropt, and from
the heart of the night a mournful cry was
borne, even as the cry of gulls far out at sea
is borne inland upon the wind.
And again the man thought of the lonely
dead folk.
And again he knelt in prayer.
33
GOD
I SAW, in a dream, the End of the World.
I had thought to behold the sea give up
its dead, the graves open, and the count-
less companies of the sleepers roll up like
mist from off the face of the earth to heaven.
I had thought to hear the Last Trump sound-
ing ; to see the heavens part like a rent veil ;
and to behold God, seated in terrible majesty
upon the clouds, while innumerable legions of
shining angels waited His bidding to marshal
the vast armies of the dead to their place
before the judgment bar of heaven.
But that which I had thought to see, I saw
not, that which I had thought to hear, I heard
not, for God gave no sign, nor any of His
angels ; and excepting that around me were
the souls of all who had lived and died on the
37
God and the Ant
earth, I had not known that the Great Day of
Judgment was indeed come.
And though the number of the dead was
many million millions, I saw that all were
gathered together as one man. For to them
that are in the Spirit, Space and Place and
Time are not. One says no longer, " I am
here," or " I go there," for " Here " and
"There" are lost in one ever-conscious "I
am," just as Yesterday and To-morrow, Past
and Future, are merged into one unending
Now.
The Last Day was indeed come, but it was
God and not man who was bidden to the bar
of heaven ; it was the Creator not the creature
who was called to judgment.
As with one voice the people cried aloud,
saying : " Come forth, Thou who wouldst
judge us, and make answer for the wrongs
Thou hast done to man."
But God made no sign.
I saw in my dream, that from among
that vast assembly, gathered together like
sheep without a shepherd upon the plains of
38
God and the Ant
Eternity, there arose one with uplifted arms,
who cried upon God, saying :
"Why hast Thou awakened us, O God?
We were a-weary and glad to be at rest ; for
though Thou didst make the spirit willing,
Thou didst make the flesh weak ; though
Thou didst ordain that man should be a little
lower than the angels, Thou didst also ordain
that he should be not far removed from the
brutes. And we were a-weary of warring
against lusts which we had not strength
to overcome ; a-weary of hoping hopes too
high for us to attain ; and we were glad
so glad ! to be at rest. Why hast Thou
awakened us, O God ? "
And again the people cried: "Come forth
Thou who wouldst judge us, and make answer
for the wrongs Thou hast done to man ! "
But God made no sign.
Then spoke a woman, wailing : " Thou
knowest my life, O God ! that I was poor
so poor ! and unlovely, and . alone. And
each day I awoke so weary that I had scarce
the strength to struggle up that I might go
39
God and the Ant
forth to work for the day's bread. And night
after night I laid me down so tired too tired
to sleep. And, as I lay, the unendurable
thought of the burden which I must take up on
the morrow and every morrow ; and the still
more unendurable thought of dying, and being
thrust down among foul and rotting things
into black nothingness and decay, set my
heart leaping like the heart of the hunted
and desperate creature which hears the hounds
behind it, but sees no nook or cranny into
which to creep that it may escape their cruel
fangs.
" And so I lived, with the shadow of death
and the burden of life ever upon me ; and now
when my long slumber has come at last when
death's horror and life's hatefulness lie behind
now Thou hast called me back to the old
burden and the old pain. Why hast Thou
awakened us, O God ? "
And the people said : " Where is He who
would judge us ? Why comes He not forth
to answer for the wrongs He has done to
man ? "
40
God and the Ant
But still God made no sign.
Then spake a man, saying :
" Have we not long enough been Thy
pitiful butt and jest, Thou Great Derider of
the Heavens, that Thou needest to waken us
out of our sleep to make sport for Thee
again ! 'Twere well done in Thee to set our
little puppet-play of a world a-going, that our
tiny woes and tears might afford Thee beguile-
ment and diversion. 'Twere well done in
Thee to make a seeming of goodness, by
giving us gifts of love and friendship, that
when they had most become part of our lives,
Thou mightest mock us by taking them from
us again. 'Twere a jest of infinite humour to
make life sweet that Thou mightest take it
from us when sweetest ; to set us in the con-
demned cell and prison of the earth, that we
might behold our companions taken out one
by one, as it were, to execution, not knowing
but that it might be our turn to be summoned
next. But that when the death we so feared
was faced and over, and the long-sought sleep
had come at last, Thou shouldst waken us to
God and the Ant
make sport for Thee again, were a rare
jest truly! Give Thee joy of Thy jest,
O God ! but wilt Thou not come forth
that we may have sight of so cunning a
humorist ? "
And the people cried out : " Come forth
Thou who makest mock of us ; and answer
for what Thou hast done."
But still God made no sign.
Then spake again a woman :
" In sin was I conceived, among thieves and
prostitutes was I born. What chance had I,
who was brought up, even as a child, to the
vilest sin, as to a trade what chance had I
to be other than what I am ? Of mine own
will came I not into the world, but of Thine.
Answer, then, Thou who didst create a crea-
ture, foreknowing that that creature must
perish everlastingly answer for the deed
Thou hast done."
And the people cried out: " Answer, O
God ! for the deed Thou hast done."
But yet God made no sign.
Then spake one, saying : " 'Twas a cruel
42
God and the Ant
deed and wanton, though at least this woman
suffers for the sins she did herself commit.
" But what say ye to a God who makes the
innocent to suffer for the guilty; yea, whose
boast it is that He visiteth the sins of the
fathers upon the children who did no wrong ?
Had any earthly judge dared, in the name of
justice, to pronounce such judgment and to
call it ' good,' the people would have arisen as
one man, cursing him and casting him out as
unworthy of his office. Is good evil, and evil
good, because God doeth it ? And shall the
Judge of all the earth do wrong, and none be
found to call iniquity, iniquity ? "
And the people cried : " What are our sand-
like sins compared to Thine ? Come forth
Thou who boasteth that Thou dost make the
innocent to suffer for the guilty ! Come forth,
and answer for what Thou hast done ! "
And yet God made no sign.
And as the people so cried, there arose from
among them a woman, entreating them to give
ear to her, saying :
" That evil might work out its own exceed-
43
God and the Ant
ing bitter punishment and for guilty parents
to know that they have inflicted upon their
children a heritage of woe, must be bitter
indeed ! God suffered it that some share of
the consequences of what the parents have
done amiss should descend to the children.
" But do not the same children profit by the
things in which the parents have done well ?
And how shall they share the good, if they do
not suffer by the evil ?
"Shall He who is infinite Justice become, as
it were, a juggler, to conjure evil into good ?
And know ye not that were not misery swift
to overtake ill-doing, man had long since
made ?. hell of God's fair earth ? And shall
God work miracles, day by day, to save
man from the consequences of man's own
evil deeds ?
" But who of us can truly say of our lives,
that the evil was greater than the good ? that
the gladness was less than the grief? For
every tear that starts to the eye, our lips have
worn a thousand smiles. Love and friendship
and little children, fields and flowers, sea and
44
God and the Ant
sky, sunshine and starlight, have made life
glad and beautiful.
" I say not that there is no misery in the
world, for were all things made plain, where
were then the test of our faith in God ?
" Not in the profession of blind optimism,
not in shutting our eyes to the mysteries
which surround us, and by protesting * All's
well with the world, therefore will I trust in
God,' does faith consist.
" If we have the fearlessness of perfect faith,
we say : ' Here is mystery dark and terrible !
here are suffering and sorrow, the loving pur-
pose of which it passeth human wisdom to
comprehend. Yet must I cling to the faith
that God is good ; and in regard to the
sorrows I see, the suffering I endure, I must
through all in spite of all trust Him, and
hold to Him though He slay me.' For is not
our God Himself a suffering God, who sends
us no sorrows Himself has not undergone?
And who that witnessed the sufferings of His
Son and were ever sufferings like to His?
could have foreseen that the cruel Cross on
45
Cod and the Ant
which He hung should hereafter be the
Finger-post to point the way to heaven ? or
that sounding through the Saviour's cry of
agony in the garden, God heard the triumph-
song of a ransomed world ?
" When you were children, you so took your
childish griefs to heart that life looked to you
like an eternity of woe, and your tiny sorrows
made sorrowful the whole world. Are the
tears of the child less bitter and less real than
the tears of the man ?
" But of these childish sorrows, how many
remained beyond the hour which called them
forth ? how many of the griefs, over which you
sobbed yourselves to sleep, endured till the
morning? how many are there of which as
much as the memory of them remains to you
now ?
" And when the White Morning of Eternity
has dawned at last, and you stand forth like
children newly risen strong in your noble
manhood, beautiful in your nobler womanhood,
and made perfect in the image of God then
shall your bitterest woe seem of as little
46
God and the Ant
moment to you, as the tear which glistens in
the eyes of childhood, even while the laugh
leaps to the lips.
"Yet we His children have thought to
fathom the ways and wisdom of God by our
ways and our wisdom, thinking that our little
minds could encompass and set bounds to the
Infinite Mind. Can the ant crawl up into the
brain of man to see man's world as man sees
it? Yet has man, whose whole world is, in
the eyes of God, but as one ant in a uni-
verse, thought to creep into God's brain,
to think as He thinks, to see as He sees,
and to judge the Omnipotent by man's
little laws.
" One there is among you, whom I heard
crying out that he was a drunkard, because
his father was a drunkard before him. Then
is his the greater shame, seeing that he fell
not into sin unwarned and unawares. And for
every one who is a drunkard because his
father was a drunkard before him, are there
not many who have taken warning by their
father's sin, and will neither touch nor taste
47
God and the Ant
the accursed thing, so that good has, in very
truth, come out of evil ?
"A woman among you has said that she
was a prostitute because her mother before
her was a prostitute, and has bidden God
make answer for creating a creature, fore-
knowing that that creature must perish ever-
lastingly.
" But can she foresee into eternity to know
what gifts are in store for her from Him who
has said that each shall be judged by his light
that from them to whom little is given,
little shall be required?
" And know ye not that the misery of the
world is of man's, not of God's making ?
" By man's tempting, not by God's decree,
did yonder woman's mother fall ; and there-
fore man's sin and man's punishment are the
greater.
" But who was it that, making in God's
name, laws unto themselves more abominable
in His eyes than the rites of heathendom, shut
fast in her face the only door by which the
wandering sheep, that He sent His Son to
God and the Ant
save, could have returned to the fold who
but her sister-women ?
"Who was it that let the sinning-against
come and go in their midst, but drew aside
their skirts, as if her very touch were contami-
nation, from the sinned-against, and by their
looks, their words, or it may be their very
silence, hounded her out from among them,
driving her, in the very recklessness of despair,
from bad to worse, from sin to infamy who
but the very Christian women who should have
been the first to hold out a hand to save ?
" It is women who would have us to believe
that the weakness of an unguarded moment
must mean a lifetime's pollution ; that chastity
is the one and only thing which, once lost, can
never be regained ; and who, by robbing
God's creatures of their birthright of self-
respect and hope, have set open a gate to hell
in every home. Who was it that dared to
arrogate and narrow down, to one negative
meaning, the sacred names of ' virtue/ ' chas-
tity/ 'purity/ and 'honour'? Think ye that
she who, for the sake of his money, marries
49 E
God and the Ant
the man she does not love, who sells herself
shamelessly and sordidly white body and
woman soul for so many hundreds or thou-
sands of golden coins is less ' fallen ' than she
who is a mother but not a wife? Think ye
that they only are ' immoral ' who have broken
one law of God ? that the woman whose lips
are defiled by lies is ' virtuous ' though her
body be chaste, or that a harlot is more hateful
in the sight of Heaven than the woman who
has set on foot a slander against her neigh-
bour ?
" Ye do well to call into question the justice
of a God who, if He had not tempered justice
with mercy, but had meted out punishment to
you according to your deserts, had not suffered
your iniquities and your hypocrisies thus long,
but had arisen in righteous wrath to strike
out your names from the Book of Life.
" Stand forth ye church-going, form-observ-
ing women, chaste, some of you, more from
self-consideration and fear of the world than
from love of purity or fear of God, or haply,
because you have never been tempted ; stand
God and the Ant
forth ye who have pronounced judgment upon
your neighbours, calling this woman 'fallen'
or that man ' lost ' whom ye shall find among
the honoured and loved of God ; stand forth
ye who have dared even to pronounce judg-
ment upon your Maker stand forth, and take
your place at the bar to which ye have sum-
moned Him ! "
The woman ceased, and as her voice died
away, there arose one upon whom all eyes
were fixed. And he spoke to the people,
saying :
'* I am he who, when in like straits to yours,
did blaspheme as you, O my brothers and
sisters, have blasphemed ; I am he who hung
by the dying Saviour he who in the hour of
death and judgment did revile that Divine
Sufferer, even as you in your hour of judgment
have blasphemed the most Holy Name of
God. I am he whom, these many a hundred
years, ye have called the ' impenitent thief/
knowing not the infinite mercy and power of
God.
" For, be it known to you that, as I hung in
God and the Ant
that Sacred Presence, I saw, ere my spirit
fled, the people mocking and reviling Him,
even as I foul sinner that I am had mocked
and reviled Him. And I saw that, even as
He had answered me not, so He answered
them never a word, but lifting His eyes to
heaven, He prayed to His God and theirs,
' Father, forgive them, for they know not what
they do ! '
"And as He thus prayed, He turned and
bent on me, me, the outcast, the blasphemer,
the vilest and most impenitent of all that vile
and impenitent throng, such look of Divine
dignity, such look of infinitely pitying and
pardoning love, that, though my anguish-
racked body, heavy with approaching death,
hung, dragging its dead weight from the cross,
I forgot the straining of my torn and quivering
hands against the cruel nails, forgot the thou-
sand tortures which each heart-throb sent
through every nerve and limb ; forgot shame
and death and judgment, in wonder and
worship and love.
" To your knees, O brothers and sisters, and
52
God and the Ant
sue for pardon, that even as I outcast and
blasphemer obtained mercy at that last
moment of my life, so may ye, blasphemers
and impenitent, be forgiven by the inter-
cession of the same Saviour who laid down
His life for us all!"
And many of the people, greatly trembling,
cried out :
" He speaketh truly. Let us kneel before
the God against whom we have done this
thing, and ask forgiveness in the name of the
Saviour Christ, who laid down His life for us
all!"
Then uprose one who spoke mockingly :
" Make not ye Christians too great a boast,
that your Christ did lay down His life for
others? Think ye that none but the Christ
has suffered death that others might live ?
The Christ did lay down His life to save a
world, knowing that in recompense He should
receive a kingly guerdon ; but men aye, and
feeble women have laid down theirs to save
a single soul in that world, though they looked
for no reward. He, to win the love of a wor-
53
God and the Ant
shipping universe, endured death willingly,
assured that when His sufferings were accom-
plished, He should inherit eternal bliss. They,
for the sake of a brother-man or sister-
woman aye, for the sake of a principle or a
creed feared not to face the wild beast's
fang, the martyr's fire, and died, praising God
and glorifying His name. And this they did,
knowing not whether the death, which they
went forth of their own accord to meet, be the
Great Mesmerist, the Shadow of whose hand,
when it falls upon our faces, calls us from
Life's sleep and trance to Eternity's awaken-
ing ; or whether he be the Great Destroyer, at
whose transmuting touch man's spirit flickers
out, and is no more, and man's body dissolves
again into the dust whence it sprang.
"Who is this Christ that He should rule
over us ? Think ye that His triumph was
dearly bought, who for a few short hours
upon the Cross is recompensed by the throne
of Heaven ? "
And some of the people murmured, saying :
"He speaketh truly. The sorrows of the
54
God and the Ant
Christ were but for a season. These many a
hundred years has He reigned secure in the
bliss of heaven, while upon earth, each minute,
a human heart was breaking. Hunger and
thirst, heat and cold, weariness of body and
sickness of soul, have been our portion.
Death and disease have had their cruel will
of us, and on every side was heard the cry of
mothers mourning for their children, children
for their mothers, wives for husbands, and
husbands for wives. Some of us died, starved
for want of bread for the body ; others and
theirs the bitterer pang heart-starved for the
want of the sympathy and love, without which
they could not live.
" And so we passed our days haunted by
the fear of death, and prey to disease and
torture, while He who calls Himself the
Saviour of man smiled down on us serenely
from the heavens, His sorrows long while
forgotten in eternal bliss."
But others crying out upon the name of the
Saviour Christ turned from him who had thus
spoken, saying :
55
God and the Ant
" This man uttereth blasphemies." Where-
at he spoke again, and mockingly :
" Where is this Saviour of Men, this Christ
who tarrieth so long ?
" What if your God the jealous God have
slain Him, saying, ' Lo! this Christ, this God-
Man, has become greater than I, and draweth
all men unto Him ! Come, let us slay Him,
that the people may have none other God but
Me.' "
And as the mocker so spoke, I saw in my
dream, as I looked upon that vast assembly,
that ONE was standing in their midst, of
whose coming none had been aware One
whose features were the features of a man,
but whose face was the face of God.
All silently and unseen He came, as once
of old to His disciples, but upon that vast
assembly there fell a hush like the silence
which follows prayer.
And turning to him who had last spoken,
the Christ made answer :
" Thou who hast throughout the world's
history put it into the heart of man to do
56
God and the Ant
devilries which no human passion could
inspire, which none but a devil could prompt
thou the author of all blasphemies and all
evil, who of old didst stir up war in heaven,
tempting the very angels of God to their fall,
comest thou at the last, thinking to work the
eternal ruin of man ? "
Then turning to the people He said :
" Look ye for the second coming of the
Christ?"
And with one voice the people chanted :
" We look for the Second Advent of the
Christ, who shall come again with glory, to
judge both the quick and the dead. Whose
Kingdom shall have no end."
And in a voice of infinite and wearied sad-
ness, He made answer :
" Even so of old awaited the Jews the
Coming of the Messiah. They looked for a
King and a Conqueror, and lo ! there came
unto them a helpless babe ! And even so,
come I unto you again the victim, not the
victor, the crucified, not the crowned, the
Christ of Calvary and Gethsemane, the bearer
57
God and the Ant
of all your burdens, the sufferer for all your
sins.
" Did you indeed think, beloved, that while
you were suffering and sorrowing on earth, I,
your elder Brother and Saviour, could rest
content in the bliss of heaven ? that I ceased
to share your sorrows when my earthly life was
at end ?
"O mothers, who mourned for your chil-
dren, it was My heart that brake when you
fell sobbing by that tiny bed ! O little chil-
dren ! every hair of whose head is sacred unto
Me, to spare whose little feet one step on a
thorny road, I would endure and gladly a
Calvary of woes ! O weary men ! O lonely
women ! whose every sorrow I have known, at
whose every tear this heart of mine has bled
think you that any nail which wounded these
hands, these feet, on Calvary's Cross, stabbed
Me with so cruel a pang, as that which pierces
My soul at any sin or sorrow of yours ?
"You have suffered for a lifetime, but I,
until time shall be no more ; and even as
every sorrow of yours has entered into My
58
God and the Ant
heart, so has every sorrow of Mine entered
into the heart of the Father.
" Said I not unto you that, ' Lo, I am with
you alway, even unto the end of the world ' ?
and thought you, that I could be with you, and
not feel with you, sorrow with you, suffer with
you ?
" But now is that end indeed accomplished ;
now are the powers of darkness for ever over-
come ; now is death, the last enemy, de-
stroyed ; and now render I up the Kingdom
to my Father, that God may be All, and in
All."
Whereat my dream passed, and I awoke
awoke so suddenly that I carried with me,
into the waking world, the words of a dream-
world prayer : " Lord Christ, who hast borne,
and dost continually bear, the burden of all our
sins and the burden of all our woes, grant that
I, at least, may never wound Thy heart, may
never add to Thy burden, by any wilful sin of
mine ! "
In at my open window, singing from the
gates of morning, came the cool sweet air of
59
God and the Ant
early dawn. And as I arose and looked out,
I saw the rising sun burst like an incoming
sea against a breakwater through a dense
bank of cloud, flooding and glorifying the
haggard streets of London with glamour of
wizard gold. Above me upraised like the
draped arm of a priest who holds the cross
on high as he pronounces the benediction
I saw the purple dome of the Cathedral, up-
bearing the golden cross that soars above the
city.
And, as I looked, the rays of the low-lying
sun broke forth behind the brooding and cross-
crowned dome, casting the shadow, slant-wise,
and thrown out into vast proportions, across
street and square.
Below me, in the street, hurrying to their
work, I saw pass and repass, haggard men and
careworn women ; but in every face I saw the
sorrowful face of Christ ; and over the great
city yea, over God's whole world I seemed
to see resting
THE SHADOW OF A CROSS.
60
THE
HEAVENLY
GRAFTING
THE
HEAVENLY
GRAT IN
AN EVOLUTIONISTS DREAM OF
THE GARDEN OF GOD
GOD, the great Gardener, looked upon
that little patch of garden ground a
mere speck among the myriad worlds
in space which we call the earth.
And God said : " Many and fair are the
flowers abloom in my earth-garden. Yet in
all the world there is no flower so fair as a
good woman, and in all the world there is no
woman so good as Mary the maiden of
Nazareth in Galilee. Here is Humanity at
its highest. Out of the dust have I fashioned
man, and upward from the dust have I led
him, step by step, and stage by stage.
The Heavenly Grafting
Here is the culminating point. Higher than
this, unaided by me, Humanity may not attain,
for in this maiden I behold Humanity's fairest
and most perfect flower. Yet the earth-flowers
bloom but to wither and to fall. Here shall
the old order change, for upon this, the fairest
and most perfect flower abloom in the garden
of earth, will I engraft the Flower of all
flowers that blooms in the garden of heaven.
Upon Mortality I will engraft Immortality,
upon the Human I will engraft the Divine.
And the blossoming of the Flower that shall
come of that union shall bring, to all the
gardens of the world, Eternal Spring. The
dead weeds of the world shall lie lifeless where
they have lain, but wherever a flower has
bloomed and fallen, there shall come with the
coming of that Flower which is called the
Christ, a stir at the dry roots, a quickening
of the sleeping sap, and lo ! all the gardens
of the world shall bloom again, and no
flower which has once bloomed shall ever
die."
64
The Heavenly Grafting
And man man that until the coming of
the Christ knew scarcely more of God than
the caterpillar which has climbed to the top
of its blade of grass, and can climb no farther,
knows of the heaven beyond who shall say
where the upward evolution of man shall end,
since into humanity has come a power outside
itself that makes humanity divine ?
THE
'ACE
THE
THE
BEVbN
ACE
DGOR
A MAN who was lonely of soul sought
the solitude of his chamber on Christmas
night.
To the young, Christmas is a season of
gladness, but the man was no longer young,
and though, rather than mar the gladness of
others, he had put aside his sorrow, and taken
part with smiling face in the day's rejoicing,
yet now that the little ones lay snugly abed
(each tiny fist fast closed upon that talisman
of happy dreams, a treasured toy) now that
the lights were lowered and the last guest
gone, the smile dropped, a discarded mask
from his face, as he seated himself, with
unseeing eyes, by the ashes of a dead fire.
He remembered that, earlier in the evening,
the fire had shone out upon him, like the
The Face
welcome upon a loved face ; that all the
warmth and light and cosiness had seemed
centred and reflected there as in a mirror,
and he had marvelled to think that what at
one moment had been dry tinder and dead
clod should spire at a touch into live spirits
of leaping flame, like the dust upon which
God breathed when He said, " Let there be
life!"
But now the dead fire seemed to gather to
itself all the menace of the night, all the gloom
and iciness that shuddered in each corner of
the chamber. The heart of it that had once
burned red now seemed to freeze black, like
an imagined moon, unwarmed and unlighted
by any sun. The stealthy cracking of the
cinders, as they contracted, chilled him as the
ominous cracking of ice chills the heart of
the skater. Yet the man sat on, his hands
splayed open, palms outward, brooding over
the spot where once had been the blaze, even
as the sick in soul brood over a vanished
sorrow.
And as he sat it seemed to him that an
70
Beyond the Door
Angel stood beside him, so that the haggard
room was filled with warmth and colour and
light.
And the Angel said :
" The Christ is heavy of heart because of
you. The Christ whom, on this, His day
of days, you have utterly forgotten, has, this
day, borne you in especial remembrance. He
has seen that, full as is your life, yet one
thing there is for lack of which you let
what remains of your youth consume away
as by a wasting fire ; one thing the absence
of which turns all your sunshine to shadow.
" Wherefore, that the cause of your sorrow
may evermore be removed, this is His Christ-
mas gift to you that whatever you shall
this day wish shall, this day, be granted."
And looking at him wearily, the man made
answer :
"How know I that your master be not the
same Satan who, ere this, to achieve infernal
purpose, has assumed angelic guise ? You
come to me saying, ' The kingdoms of this
world and the glory thereof are yours for
The Face
the asking. Speak your wish and it shall be
granted.' But even so of old have others
been tempted of Satan. What sign then have
you whereby to satisfy me that your errand is
not of Hell, but of Heaven ? "
And the Angel said :
" A baby boy lay once upon his mother's
knee. His parents were poor, and the child's
birth-chamber was humble and rude a mere
shed to shelter them from wind and rain and
very dark.
" The child's earliest memory was the starry
shining of his mother's eyes. There was a
time when all his world was heavened under
the fair firmament of her face. Its stooped
oval was scarcely less steadfast in his little
heaven than the sun is daily steadfast in your
sky, and even when he let his eyes stray from
her eyes, and wander away from the pure
arch of her brows into what, to his baby
eyes, seemed infinite space there were always
her eyes to which to come back, when the
little wanderer felt cold and lonely and
forlorn.
72
Beyond the Door
" But one day the child awoke from sleep to
find the heaven of his mother's face had gone.
With a cry of fear he raised his head to look
for her. Instinctively his baby eyes were
drawn to a something which glimmered white
and square in the darkness the one rude
window that lighted the place. It was but a
rectangular hole, cut in the side of the shed,
open to the outer air, and unprotected save for
the fact that two iron bars one stretching
from top to bottom, the other from side to
side had been set therein to close the way
against the entrance of prowling thief or wild
creature of the plain.
" Did that little child, looking now for the
first time at the Cross, thus outlined against
the twilight sky did that little child dream of
the close of an awful day to come, when three
stark and cross-hung figures should be seen
against the darkening skies of a world that
had crucified its God ?
"For that little child was the Christ, and
the sign for which you ask, whereby to prove
that I come to you in His Name, is the sign
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of the Cross, which I now make between you
and me. Is it enough ? "
The Angel paused, but, with unseeing eyes
astare, the man sat unmoved, and answered
him never a word.
Again the Angel spoke :
" Haply you are still unsatisfied and seek
less simple a sign.
" Is there not in that very simplicity that
elemental simplicity something of deliberate
and Divine intention ? The soldier may
perish in the desert where is never a stone to
mark his grave, but his comrades lash one
twig upon another, and over the desolate
resting-place, of him whom Christ died to save,
is set the symbol of Eternal Life. Once the
badge of infamy, to-day it stands for all that
is highest in humanity, divinest in God, for
in naught else is God so divine as in the
humility that stooped to take upon Himself
man's mantle of flesh, man's sorrows, and
man's doom."
The Angel paused, and waking as it were
from a dream, the man answered him sadly :
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Beyond the Door
"If any sign I seek, it is a sign whereby to
assure myself that you are not an imagined
creature begotten and born in my own sick
brain. For this night, as I sat here, I held
commune with myself, and to myself I said,
' Were an angel from God were God
Himself to appear before me, bidding me
wish the wish of my heart, and it should
be granted, I should ask not riches, nor
fortune, nor fame, nor the applause of men,
nor the love of women, but only the assurance
of Eternal Life.' "
75
II
THEN said the Angel :
"In all ages of the world there have been
men and women among them many of earth's
noblest who are sceptics by nature, who
seem constitutionally incapable of accepting
aught which cannot be proved.
" Upon such as they, God forbid that
you or I should sit in judgment. What they
believe, or do not believe, must rest between
themselves and God. But when a man who
has once been of the company of the faithful,
and has in very truth entered into the inner
mysteries which are revealed only to the eye
of faith, falls from faith, as you have fallen,
then indeed is Christ wounded in the house
of His friends ; then indeed are we in the
presence of tragedy dire and terrible. That
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The Face Beyond the Door
such an one should come to believe that God
can forget ; that the men and women whose
trust in God has been complete and unwaver-
ing, who, year in, year out, have lived as ever
in God's sight, shall at the last be allowed to
drop into dead nothingness, forgotten and
forsaken of the God whom they trusted, is
to come face to face with tragedy, soul-
slaying tragedy, compared to which the
tragedy that is concerned with the slaying of
the body is scarce worthy a thought."
For a time there was silence. Then again
the Angel spoke :
" There was once a man who was a dreamer.
He was a child of Eternity, dreaming the
dream of Time, and even while he dreamt,
he was half-awake and knew that he was but
dreaming. To others, a thought might be the
very byword for all that is intangible and unreal.
To him what they counted realities, were the
only unrealities. Things and persons had no
existence except in his thoughts of them, and
had he opened his eyes one morning to find
that this world, and the things and persons of
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The Face Beyond the Door
this world, were gone for ever, he would but
have sighed and said, * At last, then, the
awakening for which I have waited has come,
and now I am asleep no longer.'
" Not that he set thought above conduct.
He held, and rightly, that he who, knowing
that his own life, could it be seen of all, would
give the lie to his words, is yet willing to make
wares of righteousness by preaching it for pay
from a pulpit, or by publishing it for sale in
a book, is a sorrier knave than he whose busi-
ness is the circulation of false coin, for whereas
the one tampers with a currency that has been
minted by man, the other debases the coinage
which bears the image of God.
"Would'st thou 'think truly,' then 'live
truly,' was the axiom of his life, and of those
who thought truly, he would fain believe that
the heart of them, at least, was set upon
righteousness."
Ill
" THE lad held that God answers prayer. He
was not so superstitious as to suppose that the
All-Wise One will confuse the issues of a
universe at a creature's bidding. Shall he, who
sails east, ask the Lord of the Four Winds to
speed his voyage by favouring gales, when
haply one, who sails to the west, is praying for
winds from the east ? The lad knew well that
God would not be God, did He not withhold
the gift that is unwisely asked, the gift that
we seek in a narrow and selfish spirit, the gift
that can only be granted at cost of another's
loss. But he knew, too, that the child, whose
simple prayer is lisped, what time her little
head is pillowed on her mother's knee, is less
near to her earthly mother, than the man, the
very thought of whose heart is a prayer, is
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The Face
near to the Father in Heaven ; and that,
though God may deny the material gift for
which we ask, that He may give us a spiritual
gift of greater excellence, yet to those, who
unfailingly rest in Him, will He as unfailingly
give their heart's desire.
" The lad was a hero- worshipper. So
supreme an influence for good were certain
books ; so inseparably associated were they
with all that is noblest in humanity ; so in-
tensely did they make for righteousness and
perfection, that he would not be persuaded that
the writers of these books could rest content
with anything which came short of such
righteousness and such perfection as they
pictured.
" Hero-worshipper though he might be,
however, he was not so blind a worshipper
as to fail to see that certain of his idols had
feet of clay. That this singer was known to
love the gaming-table, that artist the wine-cup,
he would not attempt to deny, but his invari-
able answer was : * So much the less singer,
the less artist, he ! Wherein he sinned, therein
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Beyond the Door
his art has suffered ; yet was there never true
artist who in his heart of hearts did not realise
and revere the beauty of holiness. 1
" The man could not but so believe, for to
him all art was but a thought in the mind
of God.
" To the pseudo-artist and word -juggler, who
assured him that the fact of a book being good
or bad in its influence or its intention, has
nothing to do with its value as a work of art ;
that the book or picture must be judged by
the fact whether it be well or ill-written, well
or ill-painted, he would reply : ' You may say
so, if you choose so to say, and you may, and
with equal reason, say that the coming and
going of the sun have nothing to do with the
coming and going of day and night ; that day
is day, and night, night, whether the sun cease
to rise, or continue constant in the heavens.
Your saying so will not alter eternal principles,
and though one is far from desiring that art be
self-consciously ethical, the fact remains that
the highest art is unconsciously so, if only
for the reason that the higher the art, the
81 G
The Face
nearer it approximates to a pure thought
of God.'
" In the presence, therefore, of great pictures
or in the recital of brave deeds, in the hearing
of high music, or of a true poem, at sight of
the least of the flowers of the field the soul
of the man knelt, or stood instinctively at
prayer.
" And each morning, when the white wonder
of the dawn, bubbling up in the East, like
water rising from a spring, to over-run meadow
and glebe, and then swelling in volume, like an
incoming tide upon a level beach, sending
billows and rollers of light to wash clean the
tainted atmosphere of the world, till the morn-
ing air was cool and sweet and crystalline
as the sands which are left by a receding tide
beneath the feet each morning was to the
man as newly wonderful as was the face of
the risen Christ to those who watched by the
sepulchre each morning was a new resurrec-
tion from the dead ; a new and sacred promise
of Immortality.
"In the drag of the day, in the heaviness of
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Beyond the Door
late noontide, when all nature is at lull, when
strength slips away from the body, and thought
stands still in the brain, the angel in the man
seemed sometimes to lapse back into the
animal, and, for the moment, the life of the
senses enticed with invitation lovelier and more
alluring than the life of the soul.
" But each evening, as he dreamed himself
out into the sunset, all that was noble would
reawaken.
" Though, since the world's beginning, there
have never been two sunsets alike, yet in each
sunset found he ever that which was anciently
familiar that which set such strange stirrings
in his veins, as might stir in the veins of those
who, born of the same father and mother, look
each upon the other's face, not knowing that
they are of one blood.
" It was so that the sunset seemed to call
him, and it was so that the soul of him went
out to claim kinship with the sunset.
" At the little old church, where he had
worshipped in the morning of his days, it
had been the custom, during prayer, for the
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The Face
congregation reverently to kneel, while some,
who were stricken in years, as reverently
stood. And to him when, at eventide, all
Nature was at her orisons, the petals of the
flowers seemed like little hands folded in
prayer, while the great trees those grey-
beards of meadow and garden stood, like
the aged worshippers in the church, in sacred
and silent commune with God.
"And, indeed to the man it seemed as if
not only all Nature were at worship, but as
if the great world itself had become, as it were,
a little child of worlds among the worlds of
wise old stars. For at hush of even, the world
itself seemed kneeling. On the world's lips
was silence, yet to the listening man, that
silence was a prayer. Not now the morning
prayer that asks material blessing, but the
eventide prayer of pure and adoring worship ;
not the prayer of many words, but the prayer
so fervent that its words are few. * Our
Father, which art in heaven. Hallowed be
Thy Name. Amen.' These were the words
into which the prayer on the world's lips
Beyond the Door
seemed to frame itself; and, as the kneeling
worshippers repeat, after the minister, the
words with which he leads them in prayer,
so from the lips of the man the same words
fell. And in his heart was peace.
"To him, at such moments, it seemed as
if the lost Garden of Eden lay now beyond
the setting sun. It was the Presence of God
walking therein in the cool of the day, to hold
commune with His creatures, which gave such
glory and glamour to those sky-gardens of the
west. Then would the man point up to the
sunset, crying out, ' Dear God, all that the soul
of me loves, all that I seem to have lost my
boyhood's hopes, my manhood's strivings, my
love-dreams, my little angel child they are
not really lost. They are there, there, with
Thee, among the crimson and purple and gold.
The evil that which is not of God dies, but
all that is good, lives on for evermore."
The Angel paused. Then continuing he
said :
" You who make mock of the dreams of
youth ; you to whom the comfort of the body
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The Face Beyond the Door
is of more moment than the life of the soul ;
who hold that ' there are no such men as we
fable,' that it matters not whether a book or
picture be good or evil, so long as it be ' art ' ;
to whom death is the end of all, the Christ but
a man, and God little more than the Maker of
a vast system of machinery, from which, having
once set it a-going, He turns away, heedless
whether the world, like some huge wheel,
crush underneath or carry upwards with it,
in its revolution, the pigmy creatures with
whom He has peopled it answer me, do you
know this man of whom I have told you ?
Behold now I show you his face. Look well
thereon and make avowal whether it be familiar
or strange."
And with a cry the man made answer :
" I know it. Tis the face of the man who
once was, but now is not. The face of the
man God meant me to be."
86
IV
"Wnv did you not become that man?" said
the Angel sternly.
"Ask the God who took my boyhood's faith
from me," cried the man passionately. " God
knows I did not want to lose faith. But can
one control the thoughts that come and go in
the brain ? "
" Once you believed in the life to come,"
said the Angel, "but now you believe therein
no longer, and for this your loss of faith you
make a grievance against God a grievance
even against your fellow- creatures, whining to
them in abject and impotent self-pity, because
Death waits for you, and you fear Him. And
when they make not haste to cast from their
own shoulders upon yours the mantle of their
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The Face
pity, you rail against the unsympathetic selfish-
ness of man.
" Why should your fellow-creatures bestow
upon you the alms of their pity, seeing that
they are subject to a like fate to yours ? Is life
less sweet to them than to you? Or shall they
suffer one pang less than you in that last
awful giving up of the ghost which all mortals
dread ? Tis not the pity of God or of man
that you need, but searching and relentless
self-examination.
" Faith is to the soul what health is to the
body. 'Tis unnatural to disbelieve. Doubt is
too often the first symptom of a sick soul the
danger-signal giving warning that all is not
well with the soul, just as fainting and nausea
give warning that mischief is at work with the
body.
" And to the sick in soul, as to the sick in
body, the first question of the physician must
be, ' What of your life ? Are you living it for
evil or for good ? ' '
The Angel paused as one who awaits an
answer.
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Beyond the Door
But with sullen face and averted eyes
the man sat huddling with outstretched
palms over the dead fire, and answer came
there none save the shamed answer of his
silence.
" Do you believe in God?" asked the Angel at
last.
"I do ! " said the man. " That belief not
all the discoveries of science have shaken, can
ever shake. No one shall persuade me that
this wonderful body of ours to take only one
wonderful thing in all this universe of wonders
organs doing our bidding, unbidden and
automatically, whether we sleep or wake ;
hands that open and shut without the exertion
of conscious will-power, as if in anticipation of
our lightest wish, and with finger-tips, of which
no two are alike in all the many million
millions of human beings in the world ; eyes
that even as they look can signal to the brain
a score of colours in as many flowers, that can
read in other eyes the secret thought of other
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The Face Beyond the Door
souls, or at a glance can cross and compass the
space between this world and the farthest star ;
to say nothing of the brain which conceives,
the soul that cries after, and is akin to, God
no man, I say, can persuade me that all this
arose originally (just as fire arises out of the
striking together of flints) from what has been
termed a * fortuitous concourse of atoms.'
" It seems to me that those who cease to
believe that this world, with its punctual alter-
nation of day and night, and unerring return
of Spring (that rainbow of the seasons, which
comes, after winter storm and snow, to assure
us of the faithfulness of God, and shines across
the troubled face of a rainy sky, like laughter
in a child's eyes while still the tears are wet
upon the little cheeks) it seems to me that
those who can attribute all this, as well as the
miracle of child-birth, to blind happening of
chance, rather than to the design of an
Omnipotent Creator, should be the last to
hurl at others the reproach of superstition '
and 'credulity.' It is we, not they, who are
4 sceptics. Compared with such a theory of
The Face
life as theirs, our reasonable belief is but to
make a mouthful of a gnat, while they, in their
credulity, swallow entire camels.
" Even could they prove that this world is,
as they say, the outcome of ' a concourse of
atoms,' my faith would remain unshaken.
Resolve me this world back into a single
primordial atom, resolve me a man into an ape,
and the ape back to an amoeba, and my belief
in God, my wonder and worship, are greater
than had He seen fit to call man and ape and
amoeba into being at a word.
" Men speak to-day of science being antago-
nistic to religion. They speak as if that
theory of life which they call Evolution were
a contradiction instead of a confirmation of
belief.
" If anything can restore my lost faith in
Immortality, it is this same doctrine of Evolu-
tion or truth of Evolution as I hold it to be.
The very Scriptures, at which the unbelieving
scoff, trace the rise of our race, upward from
the dust, to the human in Adam, and from the
human to the Divine in Christ. It is unscien-
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Beyond the Door
tific, it is a flat contradiction of Evolution, to
believe that out of one type shall evolve
another and a higher, and out of that higher
type shall evolve one higher still, and so on,
and on, through countless upward stages and
ages only to hold that death breaks the
continuity by ending all.
" It has been said that if man were once an
ape, is not that the greater reason why one
day he should become an angel ? Unbeliever
in Immortality as I am, there are moments
when old faiths revive, even as to the sincerest
believer there are moments when faith falters.
Inconsistent it may be, on the part both of the
believer and the unbeliever, but to be inconsis-
tent is only to be human ; and at such moments
I tell myself that if Evolution be indeed the
Fingerpost of Science, it is heavenward and
Godward that Evolution's finger points.
Science is the truth of the natural world, just
as religion is the science of the spiritual world.
The one is built up atom by atom by the
brain : the other already is, but may be seen
only by the eye of the soul The one is a
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The Face Beyond the Door
lighthouse to warn the mariner off the rocks ;
the other is the star in the sky, by which he
steers. When our knowledge of the natural
world is equal to our knowledge of the spiritual
world, then will Science and Religion shine
forth in perfect and beautiful accord."
94
VI
THE man paused with eyes aglow, and looking
at him curiously, the Angel said :
" Believe you all this, and yet deny Im-
mortality ? "
" Listen," replied the man.
"That God concerns Himself about the
welfare of the world, about the welfare of the
race, I make no doubt ; but that He concerns
Himself to consider separately the welfare of
each individual member of that race, I have
ceased to believe. God's plans for the future
of this world, this universe, no man may know.
Even as a teacher wipes away from a black-
beard the chalked words or figures with which
he has proved a proposition or worked a sum,
so from the face of the heavens God may see
fit, ere to-morrow's morn, to wipe away, like
95
The Face
vain scribbling, His handwriting of constella-
tions, comets, moons, planets, nebulae, and
Milky Way. The time may come I believe
will come when, suddenly by fire, or slowly
by cold, He will make of this earth of ours a
moon to shine coldly by night, or a sun to
warm by day another world than ours.
" Even should He will that the human race
and this world continue, the fact remains that
though humanity may be, and perhaps is,
immortal immortal the individual man is not,
save only so far as something of himself
shall survive in the children of his body or of
his brain. In the children he has begotten,
the work he has done, or in the words he has
written, some essence of himself shall yet be
found after the body of him has ceased to
quiver with ecstasy or pain, the heart to beat,
the brain to think. ' Man is immortal till his
work be done.' Like the coral zoophyte that
comes into being and lives and dies that it may
contribute its tiny shell to the building of the
central reef, so we human beings play our
infinitesimal part. And having provided for
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Beyond the Door
the carrying on of God's scheme by obeying
the instincts of reproduction, that others may
come after us to carry on the work which we
have continued or begun then like the coral
zoophytes we die and cease to be, as little
regarded and remembered of God as they.
" Yet man, the egomaniac of created beings,
has presumptuously dared to claim for himself
that which is the attribute only of God. It is
arrogance, gross and colossal, for me to
suppose that my little ego is of sufficient
importance to continue to exist after I have
lived out the brief life which God has granted
me here.
" Who am I to claim for myself an eternal
place in the eternal scheme ? This world, that
scheme, existed before I was, and will continue
to exist when I have ceased to be."
97
VII
THEN said the Angel :
" You have called yourself inconsistent, and
inconsistent you assuredly are. First, you
profess your belief that God is all-powerful,
and in the next breath you speak as if you set
limits to God's power. To create, to call into
existence a creature, to breathe therein that
very essence and spark of God at which men
and angels must never cease to wonder, but
never can explain that something which is
called 'life' is surely more incredible, more
inconceivable, than that a living creature,
having once come into being, should never
more cease to be. In all the world, all the
universe, life, and life only, is divine. All
else planets and suns and stars are but
dead matter ; and the animalcule which the
98
The Face Beyond the Door
microscope makes visible in a drop of water
is more marvellous than they. If one thing,
and one thing only, be certain, it is that only
out of life does life come. And all life, could
we trace it to its source, leads back to God.
The science of to-day may trace life's stages
from man to the ape, and from the ape back-
wards through countless forms to the amoeba,
but sooner or later the science of to-day comes
to a dead stop. It is not what science has
found out, but what she has not found out
that completes the chain. Every century sees
science place the origin of life farther back.
Before science had learnt to make use of the
microscope, the animalcule in the water was,
though man knew not of that animalcule's
existence. A hundred years hence, man
may learn to make use of some other new
mechanism, compared to which, your micro-
scope of to-day is but a schoolboy's toy a
mechanism which may reveal forms of life so
minute that, in comparison with them, the
animalcule in the water shall seem a very
monster. But what the science of to-day, or
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The Face
of a thousand aeons from to-day, cannot, and
never will be, able to explain away, is life.
We may label it by this or that name, and,
seeing it so labeled, foolish men and women
may be content to call it by that name and to
cease to wonder, just as they cease to wonder,
many of them, at the miracles by which a
child, a sparrow, or a flower is born. But in
all the world, life, and life only, is divine, for life
comes from life, and all life leads back to God.
" Answer me. Do you doubt that the God,
who called life into being, has it in His power,
if He so choose, to continue to man the life
which God Himself has begun ? "
" I do not doubt it," replied the man.
Then said the Angel : " You doubt neither
the existence nor the power of God, but if
there be a God, as you believe, surely you
must admit that God to be good. Savages
may conceive a Supreme Power who is evil ;
civilised men and women, never. And would
a good God call into being men and women
and little children, implanting imperishably in
their hearts the belief in, and the craving for,
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Beyond the Door
immortality setting in those hearts a love
towards each other which is surely immortal
since it is the nature of God HimselfV-jojily t;o,
make mock of them at last by robbing , them
alike of life and love and immortality ? Would
you be content to let your little child, and your
tender thought for that child, all the infinite
father-love of your heart, pass out of your life
for ever? Yet you stand to your child pre-
cisely as God stands to you, with this difference
that the sum of all the father-love, all the
mother-love of the world, boundless as that
love may be, is not equal to the love of God
for any one of His creatures. To compare
your love to His love, is to set a single sun ray
against the gleaming father-sun whence all
light comes to liken a drop of water to the
mother of all waters the sea.
"Other loves may not be all unselfish, all
unsoiled of the flesh, but the ecstasy, with which
a mother hugs and gathers her child to her
heart, is the one pure passion, the white flame
of which casts no shadow, since, like God's
love, it seeks only to give.
101
apd rbJoopi in due season,
* .* .*?ft en 3-nd women, He set
: 'tafity In their souls, knowi
The Face
" Just as a gardener sets seeds in the soil to
lie dormant for a time, and then to spring up
ad rbJoopi in due season, so when God made
the seed of immor-
knowing that motherhood
and fatherhood would call it into flower. Nay,
I go farther than this, and say that, were there
no promise of a hereafter in the Scriptures, had
Christ never come, and were there no word
of immortality in all the natural and spiritual
world I am persuaded that belief in immor-
tality is a flower which would have sprung,
self-seeded, in the garden of a mother's heart.
I am persuaded, even that had God not planned
immortality for His creatures, He would not be
the God He is, could He look upon human life,
human love, and most of all upon the love of
father and mother for their child, and refuse
to grant to them and to their child, the
immortality for which they crave.
"A little maid once said that she knew
there was a heaven because of the presence of
flowers on earth. Her mother, she said, had
shown her dandelion-down afloat upon the
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wind, and had told her it was thus that the
first flowers had come, wind-seeded from
heaven.
" 'Twas but a pretty fable to take the
fancy of a child, but it is a fable which has
a meaning for God's children of older growth.
" The presence of beauty on the earth is
surely a witness to the love of Him who is
Eternal Loveliness. Tell me that Nature
bestows those colours upon the flower to
attract the bee, that this effect comes of
Evolution, that of Natural Selection, and I
shall not say you nay, for Nature does> indeed,
seem to evolve out of herself that which she
requires for her own purposes and for the
maintenance of life. But it was God, the
Eternal Loveliness, who tinted that sunset
sky, who gave those changing colours to the
sea, who made the rainbow that flower of
the sky which blooms and withers betwixt
sunshine and a shower an arch of living,
luminous opal and pearl.
" Has art, which men miscall long art,
which is not long, but eternal no inner
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The Face Beyond the Door
meaning to your eye ? Has music no message
for your ear? music, of which one of the
great of the earth once said, 'Away! Away!
thou speakest to me of things which in all
this life I have not found, and in this life
shall never find ' ; music which is surely angel-
speech heard of mortal, but as yet untrans-
latable to mortal ear ; music which is none
other than the sound of the deep waters of
Eternity breaking on the shallow shores of
Time?"
104
VIII
AGAIN the Angel spoke :
" You say that you have ceased to believe
in Eternal Life. It seems to me that the
falling from faith of you, and such as you,
goes farther back, and that you have ceased
to believe in Him who is Eternal Life that
what is at fault is not so much your faith in
immortality as your faith in God."
"It is God's care for the individual of
which I seek to be assured," repeated the
man. " The question whether I have failed,
or have not failed in faith, matters nothing
in comparison with the question whether
God the Creator has called into being a
creature no matter whether that creature be
man or mouse, horse or bird, dog or ant
only to leave that creature, like a fatherless,
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The Face
motherless foundling cast out upon the street,
to starve or to be fed, to live in comfort, or
to perish miserably as the cruel chance may
be. Even earthly parents may not so re-
pudiate their responsibilities. Mothers have
faced death a thousand times for the sake of
their child. The very bird in the hedge will
yield up its little life in defence of its brood.
Yet we, God's children whether of the human
race or of the dumb creation come into this
world, only to be left to the tender mercies
of the cruellest of all foster-mothers, Dame
Chance.
" Last summer, as I walked in my garden, I
heard a fledgling sparrow chirruping merrily
under a bush. Possibly he had by accident
dropped out of his nest, and, by making
parachutes of his wings, had so broken his
fall as to reach ground without taking hurt,
and was now in a flutter, between pride and
fear, at his own daring. For a few minutes
I watched him ruffling it as roguishly as a
robin, now cocking his glossy head at a
sprawling worm, now stropping his tiny beak,
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Beyond the Door
razor-wise, upon a twig, and twittering lustily
meanwhile for very joy of his freedom and
of his merry youth and of the summer
morning.
" But, alas ! as into the First Garden there
stole and slid the serpent, so, into our later
gardens, a fanged and spitting creature, of
like cruelty, crouches and watches, with belly
to the ground, to spring upon its prey ; and
lest my small sparrow, so merrily at matins
under a bush, should find some prowling cat
to play at clerk by saying Amen to his
matins and thereafter making an end of
them, and of him, I chased the feather-
surpliced chorister into a corner, and in spite
of the valorous onslaught of his beak, set him
high up upon a cedar bough. Whether the
fact of my placing him there led him to
suspect some trap or ambush from which he
must make haste to escape, or whether it was
sheer flurry and fright which brought him to
the ground, I cannot say, but scarcely was
my back turned, before again he had taken
cover under the bush. Again I caught him,
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The Face
setting him, this time, high on an ivied
window-ledge where cat could neither climb
nor leap ; and yet again he came to ground.
When I had a third time set him out of
reach of danger, and he had a third time as
resolutely come back to it, I thwarted the
small malcontent no longer, but returning to
my hammock, I insinuated myself therein and
with my fingers between the pages of a book,
lay a-swing in the sunshine as in the centre
of a golden globe. For a time I forgot both
book and bird. Then suddenly my golden
globe shattered into darkness at a sound
a mere thimbleful of sound a scream of
terror and agony, so tiny and yet so haunting
and so horrible, that I seem to hear it even
now.
"A tame rook, that has the run of my
garden, had pinned the sparrow, breast upward,
under his talons, and, as I looked, was stabbing
the life out of him with iron beak. For the
wee bird no happy warbling among the
leaves ; no happier rearing of his young. It
seemed to me as if he had been robbed of
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Beyond the Door
his right to live, and though it is but what
happens somewhere every hour perhaps
every minute of each summer day, the
sight of that helpless nestling, done to death
in the June sunshine, and by one of his
feathered kin, turned me sick and faint with
horror. 'Twas murder, bloody and cruel,
and in thought I could not forgive the God
who had made a world upon such a plan."
Then said the Angel :
" You know no more of God's purpose than
that sparrow knew of yours. To the fluttering
nestling, well nigh panting out his tiny life in
terror, you seemed some cruel monster, hunt-
ing him down to kill, whereas your thought
was but to place him beyond reach of
danger. And you lost patience with the
little creature that, haply, God had committed
to your care. Thrice only did you succour
him and then, manlike, left him to his fate,
and now would throw upon God the blame
for the death which you countenanced.
"Had God dealt with you as you dealt
with God's bird ; had God not borne with
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The Face
you, not thrice, but thrice three thousand
times, where had you been to-day? And if
God saw fit to set that little creature singing
in the green groves of Paradise (and who
dare say that God has no place in His
universe for the sparrow, that God Himself
has told us is evermore within His care!);
if God saw fit at the cost of a moment's pain
to take His bird happier than ever for the
knowledge of danger for ever past where
danger shall menace never more, what is that
to you ? "
"It may be that you are right," answered
the man. "It may be that for the wings
which could not carry the bird beyond reach
of the danger which lurks in an earthly
garden, God gave that little creature wings
which could bear him afar to the garden of
God. From a harp or violin, which is out
of tune, comes not music but discord. It may
be that even as a musician screws tighter and
tighter each separate string, till the whole
instrument be in harmony, so the racking of
nerves which we call pain may be no more
no
Beyond the Door
than the touch of God's hand, tuning the
strings of men's souls to sweet accord, that
out of discord shall come harmony, out of
brief suffering shall come eternal bliss !
" But listen !
" I had a friend whom I loved more dearly
than a brother the truest, gentlest, most
stainless, and unselfish of gentlemen. For
many years he and I, and two other close
friends and cronies, constantly met and walked
and talked or sat at table together. He was a
frequent visitor at my house, and occasionally
would accompany me to the homes of the
other two members of our circle ; but none of
us was ever asked to his. Naturally we made
no comment upon this, either to him or to each
other. If among friends we must remain
silent about matters which are told us in confi-
dence, it is even more sternly imperative that
we remain silent in regard to matters concern-
ing which confidence is withheld.
" One day (I shall never forget it) he opened
his heart to us.
" ' You must have wondered to yourselves,'
in
The Face
he said, ' why it was that I have never asked
any of you to my home. I had hoped to have
gone to my grave without speaking, but now
my hands are forced. For eighteen years my
wife has been a drunkard. Now, God help
me ! she has gone, as women who drink, too
often, do, from drink to worse if anything can
be worse in a woman than the systematic
bestialisation of herself by drink. But she
has gone, as I say, from drink to worse, and
for the sake of my daughters, who are just
growing into womanhood, I am compelled to
divorce her. Up to now no word of this has
ever passed my lips. On the contrary, I have
lied consistently and deliberately, that others
might be led to believe, as you have been led
to believe, that my home was happy and that
she was the best of mothers and wives. Of
that lie I am unashamed, for it was not an
untruth of the heart. Had I for any reason,
or for no reason, to face the scaffold, God
knows that, God helping me, I would climb
that scaffold with tripping step and smiling lips,
rather than that any emotion of mine should
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Beyond the Door
give zest and edge to the gossip of the canaille
over their cups. Think, then, what it meant
to a man of my pride to know his wife, the
bearer of his name, the mother of his children,
for a shameless drunkard ! You have wondered
sometimes that one, who is still comparatively
young, should be thus prematurely aged. You
have wondered that my hair is grey and thin,
that my nerves are shattered, my body feeble
and bowed, and that I speak with embittered
spirit and barbed tongue. Had you grown to
hate God's very sunlight, as I have, because, in
the sweet but searching light of the sun, the
secret of my shame and of her sin was more
apparent than by night your wonder would
cease.
" ' At night the unsteady step, the bottle
slipped under a cloak, and brought from that
depot of the devil whither she had gone,
ostensibly, to purchase groceries, but in reality
to take away gin these might escape a neigh-
bour's eye. With the fellow who sold it to her
the secret was like to be safe. Scandal of
another sort might be whispered across a
113 i
The Face
counter or over teacups. It could do no more
than stab at a woman's reputation, a man's
honour, but business secrets since they affect
the takings of the till must among men of
business be held sacred. The firm of Satan &
Co. has its agents in high as well as in humble
places, and has touts of all sorts, saints and
shopmen, statesmen and sinners, at work
extending its ancient trade, but at few estab-
lishments is so roaring a business driven, as at
those Ticket Offices for Hell where a
husband's earnings are supposed to be spent
in groceries, but in reality are squandered in
brandy, whisky, or gin.
" ' I had hoped, as I say, to have kept my
hideous secret to myself, but now, alas !
secrecy is no longer possible. Recently I was
compelled to remain the whole of the night by
the bedside of a patient for whose life I was
fighting hand to hand with death. Next
morning at five, as the crisis was past, and the
patient sleeping, I crept home in the grey of
the dawn that I might snatch a few hours' rest
before commencing the work of another day,
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Beyond the Door
only to find that my wife had availed herself of
my absence to get drunk, and while in that
condition had admitted into my house, under
the very roof where her young daughters were
sleeping, a villain with whom I now learn she
has long been carrying on an intrigue. Upon
the man, feeble as I am, I have put a mark
which, please God, he shall carry to his dying
day. It is a mark seeing which all shall say,
" That disfigurement was done to a villain and
a blackguard by. the man whom he had foully
wronged."
"'The woman, for her children's sake, I
spared but to small purpose. She was placed
under lock and key, but a fox is not more
cunning than a dipsomaniac under the craving
for drink. She contrived in some way to
escape, and being found drunk in the streets,
was taken to the station. I made strenuous
efforts to keep the case from coming before a
magistrate, and so appearing in the papers, but
she was equally set on courting scandal. She
saw in this public washing of dirty linen a
means to injure, perhaps to ruin me. People
The Face
hesitate to call in a doctor who cannot order
his own house decently, or who comes,
perhaps to a critical case, with harassed mind
and nerves unstrung. There is no madness
so cruel as the madness which is born of a
woman's lust of drink. To injure the very
man whom she has most cause to love,
the man who is fighting for her soul with
the devil, and to save her from herself, she is
ready to involve him, herself, and her children
in one common ruin. The prostitute on the
street is less shameless ; the suicide is less
reckless than the woman who has drowned in
drink the angel which God sets in the bosom
of every woman. Men may, and do, soak
away their manhood. It is hateful, it is
hideous that they should do so, but when the
angel in a woman dies, the angel's place is
taken by a devil from Hell.
" * The rest is soon told. There was a
terrible scene in court, the unhappy woman
shouting my name hysterically to the reporters
that everybody should know, as she said,
whose wife she was. She accused me of
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Beyond the Door
being a man of drunken habits as well as an
unfaithful husband, and when the magistrate
said he could not listen to her, she refused to
leave the court, and had to be removed
forcibly, screaming out shamelessly, as she
went, the story of her unfaithfulness, and
declaring that it was my wickedness which had
driven her to it.
" ' That is what drink can do to one who
had once been a pure woman, a good wife, and
a loving mother.' '
117
IX
THE man paused in his story, and when he
spoke again, his words were like a challenge
thrown in the face of the listening Angel.
" The friend of whom I have told you is
dead. His heart was broken. The woman
who was once his wife still lives, but of the
vileness of the life she leads I may not speak.
" I passed her in the street to-day, and the
face of her was so shameless, so bestialised by
vice and drink, that I searched in vain for a
sign, not only of her Divine origin, but of her
womanhood, of her very humanity.
" It may be that, even on earth, pain and
suffering have some ultimate outcome in good.
But out of the bestialisation of a soul, it is
surely impossible, even to God, that good can
come ; and that God could bring into the world
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The Face Beyond the Door
an immortal soul, most of all a woman, fore-
knowing that she would sink to such an abyss
of degradation, that God could do this, makes
me sometimes feel that rather than believe in
such a God, one does God honour by refusing
to believe in a God at all."
As the man's voice ceased, it seemed as if he
slept within his sleep, as if he dreamed within
his dream ; from which sleep, from which
dream, he presently awakened, crying out :
" I have seen a vision."
"What saw you therein?" inquired the
Angel.
" I saw in my dream the place to which pass
the souls of them who in life have been slaves
of strong drink. I had thought to see some
manner of prison-house, Hades or Purgatory,
yet to me it seemed less like a place of punish-
ment than of healing for the sick of body and
of soul. It seemed indeed as if nowhere else
in the universe was the expense of God's pity
so tender and so infinite as in this place, where
I saw faces degraded out of all human likeness
by debauchery and drink. I remember that in
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The Face
some strange way the dwellers therein were
aware of, and were witnessing, the daily life of
the woman of whom I have been speaking, the
woman whom I passed this day in the street,
the woman who was once the loved and
honoured wife of my dead friend. They saw
her staggering, sottishly drunk, in the streets ;
they saw her strike brutally at her child when
the little one cried out wanly, weakly, for
bread ; they saw her bartering soul and body
alike in an infamous traffic for the blood-money
wherewith to buy more drink.
" Whether I were in that prison-house for
long years, as indeed it seemed to me then, or
but for a moment, as I now suppose it must
have been, I cannot say, but I know that in
presence of the terrible object-lesson of that
woman's life, which they were compelled thus,
in their own despite, to witness, some sense,
some realisation, of its loathsomeness, seemed
to awake, even on the faces of the most
degraded.
" Slowly, subtly, 1 saw the stubbornness, the
shamelessness, of those drink-debauched faces
1 20
Beyond the Door
soften into some semblance of humanity, of
womanhood.
" In the eyes of one poor creature, wit-
nessing thus the sinnings of her sister woman,
I saw loathing and horror grow. * God of
Pity, have mercy upon me ! ' she cried in
agony, and, as the words left her lips, I
heard a sound like the thankful sigh of listen-
ing angels. And when yet another woman,
witnessing her earth-sister's shame, cried out
in even more terrible agony of soul, 'God
of Pity, have mercy upon her / ' there came
the sudden happy harping of saints in
Heaven ; and she who had so spoken, her
face strangely beautiful, passed out of that
place, and I saw her no more.
" Then, looking back upon earth, I beheld
death come swiftly, mercifully, to the sinning
woman ; and it seemed to me, ere the vision
passed, that her soul was winging its way to
the same place of repentance."
The man ceased, and for a season he was
silent. When again he spoke, his voice was
passionate, yet pleading.
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The Face Beyond the Dooi
" Was this all a dream, born of sad
memories?" he asked, "or is there, beyond
the grave, some such prison-house as that I
visioned ? "
And very gently the Angel made answer :
" The veil which hides the mysteries of
the spirit world may not for mortal be with-
drawn. May it not be, however, that these
things are a parable ; and that what you have
seen is God's word to you, that you may
pause ere yet again you say that, even to God,
it is impossible that, out of the degradation
of God's creature, good may come ? "
122
X
WHEN next the man spoke there was a new
note of hope in his voice, and from his face
something of the heaviness of his doubt had
passed.
" Is there aught else that still troubles
you ? " asked the Angel.
"Only this," said the man. "They, who
should know better than I, would persuade
me that to modern science it is possible to
associate this or that attribute of a man with
this or that portion of his brain. Here, they
say, in this particular cranny, are located
the grey cells whence man's moral sense
comes ; here is yet another centre which is
responsible for his perception of what is
beautiful in art. Injure or destroy, by acci-
dent or design, this set of brain cells, and
The Face
the man's moral sense is correspondingly
either injured or destroyed. Destroy or do
injury to the parts where are performed the
processes by which he writes poems, paints
pictures, or composes music, and a like result
will follow a like cause. The brain, they say,
secretes thought, as the liver secretes bile,
and out of that thought grew the conception
of a soul. But the soul, they would persuade
me, is nothing more than a higher manifesta-
tion of the brain, and, like the brain since
both are material may and must be des-
troyed.
'" If this be true, if the researches of science
have incontrovertibly proved that brain and
soul are one and the same, then man's dream
of a soul, which survives the dissolution of the
body, beautiful as that dream may be, is gone
for ever."
" Do you believe that you have an immortal
soul ? " inquired the Angel.
"There was a time when I did so believe,"
replied the man, "and there are times when
I am not far from so believing now, but more
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Beyond the Door
often than not I look back on that belief as
one of the lost illusions of youth."
And the Angel made answer :
" If the Devil were in need of a lie to serve
some evil purpose, he would look for it, not
among the recorded words of those whom
the Churches have excommunicated and de-
nounced as antichrists and deceivers. Rather
would he choose to make search among the
musty-fusty collection of so-called truths which
hallowed by universal acceptance and the
dust of centuries lie pigeon-holed away as
self-evident, self-proved and unassailable. Of
all these ancient and lying adages, the Devil
finds no such tool for his purpose as that
which would have men to believe that youth
with its dreamings is foolish, and age with
its disillusionment, wise ; for as has been said,
* There shall come a time when man shall
awaken from his lofty dreams to find his
dreams still there, and that nothing has gone
but his sleep.'
" Tell me, do you remember your mother
and the manner of her passing ? "
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The Face
" I remember," answered the man.
" Describe to me that passing," said the
Angel.
"It was from peritonitis, and the agony was
so terrible that the doctors mercifully kept
her under opium, up to the moment of her
passing. I shall not soon forget that passing.
The drug had been administered at frequent
intervals, and in such large doses that if the
brain and the soul be one, and subject there-
fore to the laws of matter, then must the
very soul and brain of her have been para-
lysed and put out of all action by the opium.
Under its influence the face was scarcely
recognisable, for of the eyes wide open as
the eyelids were only the whites seemed
visible, and she lay with every sense so
drugged and drowned that a log had scarcely
been less capable of a conscious thought.
" Suddenly, in an instant, there was a
marvellous, a miraculous change. I say a
4 change,' yet none of us saw any change take
place. It was but that the other face had
gone, and that in its stead there looked out
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Beyond the Door
at us the beautiful saint-face of one of the
holiest and most Christ-like of women. And
never had those eyes looked at her husband
and at her children with more conscious love
than then. And on that face was a light
which I may not describe, since not in all
the wonderful world is there aught to which
it may be likened. But, seeing that light, we
who stood in the darkened room, hand clasped
in hand around the bed, felt for a moment
as if we were in the very Presence of God.
And with that light on her face, and with such
look of infinite and tender love in her eyes as I
shall never see in human eyes again, she died."
" Whence came the light, whence came that
look of conscious love ? " asked the Angel.
"If the soul and the brain be one, then from
your own showing the brain of her was so
drugged and drowned in opium that a log, as
you have said, had been scarcely more incapable
of conscious thought."
And steadfastly the man made answer, " I
believe that what I saw was the passing of a
pure and saintly soul to God.''
127
XI
SUDDENLY the man stirred in his sleep. Christ-
mas had come and gone, for the clocks were
striking twelve, and soon upon the midnight
clear came the carillon of cathedral bells
chiming a hymn:
Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come ;
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
" Do you know that hymn ? " said the Angel
softly. "It is the very anthem of eternity.
Though but two hundred years old as it now
stands, it seems ancient as humanity. It is
easy to believe that, far back in the morning of
the world, when man was first groping after
God, was first stretching feeble hands into the
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The Face Beyond the Door
dark, if haply somewhere amid the darkness he
might find the hand of the unknown, unseen
Father it is easy to believe, I say, even thus
early in the history of the race, that the cry of
the creature, after the Creator, would shape
itself into some such words as these. It
sweeps the whole gamut of the ages. It is
as true to you, to-day, as it was to your fathers,
and it was as true to your fathers' fathers, as
it was to the far back progenitors from whose
loins the race first sprang. And when you
have become of no more moment in this world
than the specks of dust which are whirled by,
on the winds of a winter that is dead and gone,
that hymn will be as true to your children,
and to your children's children, as it is to the
anxious, timid, yet trusting hearts of to-day.
"It is more than the anthem of eternity to
which I have likened it. It is a pledge and
promise of Immortality.
" Whether some atom of the dust of Moses,
on whose words the hymn was founded, be
blown hither and thither on some sandy
Palestinian plain, is neither mine nor yours
129 K
The Face Beyond the Door
to know, but that the thought, which first
called the words of the hymn to the lips of
Moses, is alive to-day, millions can bear
witness. And shall the thought be looked
for among the quick, and the Soul, that gave
birth to that thought, be looked for among the
dead ? As well believe that man, the creature
man who was once but a thought in the
mind of God shall survive to see his Creator
perish.""
130
XII
AGAIN the man slept and dreamed.
In his dream he saw a walled Eastern
city, the four-square houses of which, low-
domed as the clay-built kraal of the beaver,
clustered (like meadow-mushrooms upspringing
amid fallen rocks) around columned temples,
palaces, and towers. Overhead the sun
burned in a sky so blue, that temples, towers,
palaces, and the rounded roofs under which
the populace was thick-hived, gleamed like
washed marble, or whitened in the glare, like
linen which housewives spread to bleach upon
the grass.
And in the chief street of the city a turbulent
mob of men, women, and children, some un-
clean of person, and clad in ragged gaberdines,
filthy as the garbage that festered in the street
The Face
corners ; others spruce, turbaned and richly
robed, pressed howling and hooting where a
solitary prisoner strode between two files of
soldiery.
One knew by the bound wrists that He was
a prisoner, else by His royal bearing, the
majesty of His brow, and the native grace and
dignity with which He moved, one had
thought Him to be some great monarch
moving to the judgment throne amid massed
and acclaiming multitudes.
Looking at that advancing Figure, tall as
the tallest of the picked Roman guards, erect,
spare, soldier-like, noting the superb poise of
the head upon the shoulders, the strength and
stateliness of the stride, one ceased to wonder
why it was that half a score of grown men,
greedy of gain, and made bold by avarice, had
incontinently left their overturned money-tables,
and fled panic-stricken from the Temple, rather
than face a whip of small cords in the hand of
a single man.
Remembering that He was of gentle birth
and noble lineage, remembering that the blood
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of kings ran in His veins, one might have
thought it was contempt for the rabble, yelping
beside and behind Him, which lent such "lift"
and aloofness to the nobly-formed head.
But as one so thought, one remembered too
that it was from the very poor His disciples
had been chosen, and that He had elected
to be despised as a Nazarene and the friend
of publicans and sinners. Remembering, too,
that He had made choice of the carpenter's
bench, at which to work, beholding the infinite
humility, the boundless compassion which
softened the awful fire of those sin-accusing
eyes, the onlooker realised that here was One
to whom the very scum, the outcast, the fallen,
and the lost, of His fellow-creatures must be
sacred ; One who even for the vile must
entertain compassion, but never, even for the
vilest of the vile, contempt.
One's first thought at sight of that Figure
was a thought of sheer joy the supreme and
sunny joy with which the heart of a happy
child suddenly over- wells the joy of June
mornings when all the world is made anew ;
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The Face
when we waken to see, through the open
casement, Summer, who has been up before
us, go singing on her way with an armful of
flowers ; and when there is never a moment
that the air around us is not a-ripple with
bird-song, or with the shaken silver bells of
baby-laughter or child-speech.
Looking at that advancing Figure, all Life's
fetters seemed suddenly to fall away, all Life's
flowers seemed suddenly to burst into blossom.
Now, at last, and for the first time, could it
be realised that man was indeed made in the
likeness of God, for into this imperfect world
had come One who, though of like flesh and
blood to ours, was perfect and pure and
beautiful, alike in body and in spirit ; and, at
sight of this perfect and beautiful work of God,
the heart of humanity could not but sing in
sheer joy, for now at last might humanity
tower to perfection, now might flesh and blood
spire into spirit.
Yet, as one drew near and beheld the awful
sorrow of that face, the joy that sang in one's
heart quivered suddenly into a stabbing
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Beyond the Door
dagger, for from those eyes looked out all the
sorrow of all the world. One endured moment
of such sorrow, as lay behind those eyes, had
slain the man who was no more than man.
Only God could endure such sorrow and
live !
To say that in realising that upon this single
soul was laid the burden, and was laid the
blame, of all the sin and sorrow of the world,
and that in realising this fact one realised also
that He was a willing bearer of the burden, is
but imperfectly to express the thought which
the sight of that Figure aroused in one's mind,
since " willing " implies consent, rather than
choice, submission rather than command,
whereas of that Figure every onlooker felt
instinctively that here was one to compel, not
to acknowledge, allegiance ; one who obeyed
no dictate save the dictate of His own soul,
and, in obeying His own soul, served and yet
ruled by right Divine.
In the same sense, notwithstanding that He
walked with bound wrist, one felt it was He
who held His captors captive ; not they, Him.
The Face
In all the crowd no churl raised cowardly hand
to strike at Him, but was aware in his heart
that had the Christ so willed it, the arm which
was raised against the Holy One had withered
at the shoulder. They knew, those dastards,
that He who had healed the sick and raised
the dead, yet scorned to use His powers in
His own behalf; and this knowledge it was
which gave new zest to the malignity with
which they struck at that defenceless head.
As He walked, a thrown flint smote Him on
the brow, cutting the delicate flesh to the bone,
yet, save to wipe aside the trickle of blood
that ran into His eyes, He gave no heed to it,
nor troubled even to turn His head to see
whence the missile came.
Yet when, later, an onlooker, striking
savagely at Him, caused Him to stumble
for a moment against the soldier who walked
at His side, the Christ turned with such grace
of high breeding, such courtly smile, to crave
pardon for the mishap, that, compelled instinc-
tively to the respect which the common soldier
accords to the officer, the hind to the gentle-
136
Beyond the Door
man, the rude Roman stood unconsciously at
salute.
Only once did the awful aloofness of the
Christ give place to more awful anger. In all
that surging mob His was the one face upon
which no passing mood was mirrored. At
Him the trained soldiery, forgetful of drill and
discipline, and driven in their own despite to
wonderment at such fortitude, might turn in
the ranks to stare, but by Him was no curious
gaze returned. He, the object of the crowd's
cries and scorn, was the one soul present by
whom neither cries nor scorn were heeded.
Suddenly the cries ceased. A score of
yards away a crowd was gathering, and thither
the inconstant mob, greedy to peer and pry,
and hoping for some new victim upon whom to
wreak its spite, scurried like clucking hens !
But still that solitary prisoner steadfast-
eyed, august, inscrutable strode on, aloof alike
from fear, from hate, from scorn, and from
idle curiosity.
As the little band of guards, with the
prisoner in the midst, came nigh to the cause
137
The Face
of the disturbance, the crowd, fearful of the
soldiery, fell back. A woman of the streets,
her baby at her breast, was dancing wantonly,
and at each lewd gesture the ribald onlookers
jeered and cheered anew. As the Christ
passed the woman, He turned to look sorrow-
fully upon her, and on meeting the challenging
purity of His eyes, she reeled as one reels at
the lightning flash, and then sank with bowed
head upon her knees, crying out, " Unclean !
Unclean ! Lord of all Holiness, speak but the
word and I shall be pure ! "
Whereat an evil-faced priest spurned her
with his foot as she knelt, so that she and
her child fell to the ground. And at that sight
there blazed from the eyes of the Christ such
fire of divine wrath as with fists tight clenched
He strained against His bonds that He might
strike the miscreant to the ground that even
the rude soldiery of Rome, meeting that glance,
quailed and fell away from where He stood.
Then to the dreaming man the scene of his
dream shifted.
Night had come and fitly, for even then
138
Beyond the Door
was being done the deed on which Nature
herself, shuddering and horror-stricken, had
refused to look ; the darkest and most awful
deed in the world's history the Sin of sins,
the Crime of crimes, the murder by the men
and women, whom He came on earth to save,
of humanity's Maker and God.
Yes, night had come, though it was but the
sixth hour of the day, yet never before had
such night made strange the earth, made fear-
ful the heavens. With the night had come
darkness not the merciful darkness that fast-
closes the shutters of sleep, that steals over the
tired brain and lulls the tired body to rest ; not
the darkness that hides away the hovels of
earth and makes manifest the glittering star-
ramparts which fortress the palaces of heaven ;
but a hideous, haunting, semi-darkness, like
the twilight of Hell a darkness that was not
all dark, but was pregnant with horror and
with the menace of unimaginable evil.
As if from some smiling face the flesh had
suddenly fallen, laying bare the grinning bone
beneath, so from the face of the sky the light
139
The Face
had faded, and where, but a moment before,
the sun had been empty darkness gaped as
from the eyeless sockets of a skull. Yet over
the face of the earth, rising like some miasmic
exhalation, there came and went, uncertainly,
strange phosphorescent lights the outcome,
it may be, of smouldering subterranean fires
within now, and for the first time, become
visible because of the darkness ; a light which
made more unearthly the most awful scene
which mortal eye has witnessed.
For a moment the earth and the darkness
which had closed around it seemed to sway
together like interlocked wrestlers come to the
death-grip. The earth reeled, as reels the
spent wrestler whose strength fails him, and
then, as if from under the cloak of night, the
one had treacherously drawn dagger on the
other, came the swift stab of the lightning.
Beneath the feet of the bystanders the earth
leaped and shuddered, as if smitten to the
heart, and, following upon the lightning, there
fell such crash of awful thunder as shall never
again on earth be heard till that dire day when
140
Beyond the Door
God shall toss man's world a dead end of dry
tinder to the central furnace of a sun which,
in its turn, shall become fuel, to feed the
fires of a sun that lightens another universe
than ours.
And in the lightning's flash the man saw the
whole scene that was outspread before him.
He seemed to be standing upon the outskirts
of the same city. The land, that lay nearest to
the city wall, was tilled and cultivated, or laid
out into walled gardens, with here and there
a house, planted around with trees. Farther
out the ground was broken and uneven, and,
save where a herdsman had built himself a
hut and weeded out a stone-enclosed patch of
garden, had in many places been allowed to
run to waste.
One spot in particular, that rose in a slight
declivity, was terraced by step-like ridges, bare
as picked ribs, whitening on the desert sands.
The summit of the declivity was formed of
hard rock, domed and polished like the upper
half of a skull, and surrounded by a low and
loosely-built wall of stone.
141
The Face
And here, against the pall of dead night, was
to be seen the cross-hung figure of the prisoner
who, like some great monarch moving through
massed multitudes to his throne, had that day
passed on to Calvary and to the cross.
Looking upon that scene, that figure, the
dreaming man realised how blind, how misled
have been many of those who have essayed
to depict that scene, that figure, on canvas
or in stone. Too often they do no more than
show us a tortured and crucified man, with
hanging head and glazed eyes, broken, bleed-
ing, and shrunken of body ; sorrowful, even
abject of mien ; a figure of infinite pathos,
infinite anguish ; a subject inviting infinite
tenderness, infinite pity, infinite tears.
Pity ! Looking upon that figure the
dreaming man dared less to think of pity
than, standing in that sacred presence, to
blaspheme.
Anguish and tears of compassion, anguish
and tears of repentance, anguish and tears
of remorse ! But pity ! The very angels of
heaven had shrunk in horror from the impious
142
Beyond the Door
mortal who dared to offer the alms of his
pity to the God whom that mortal's sins had
stretched upon the cross.
For here was no man, come and compelled
to the last awful giving up of the ghost. Here
only was God taking with both hands to put
off as a king might put off his crown the
dear human life to which the human heart of
Him so passionately clung; the life to part
with which it cost Him such black anguish of
horror as it has never entered into the heart
of man to conceive ; the life below, which His
love for humanity had made dearer to Him,
it may even be, than the life above.
Looking into those eyes the dreamer knew
that every moment of the life, which was now
ebbing away, had been, and was, an seon of
endured agony. Every separate sorrow of
every single soul that was, that had been, and
that was to come, was lived out to the last
pang in the torture chamber of that single
soul. Into that chamber only God's eye could
see, but the dreaming man knew that, looking
therein, God saw the Christ take upon Himself
The Face
the sorrow wherewith Rachel had mourned and
refused to be comforted, the burden of David's
pain when he cried out : " O my son Absalom,
my son, my son Absalom. Would God I had
died for thee, O Absalom ! My son, my son ! "
And looking thereon God saw the shame that
rent the sick soul of Peter after the denial of
his Master and Lord ; saw, even, resting upon
the white soul of Christ, the black shadow of
despair and remorse under which Judas stole
out to hang himself in the Field of Blood.
When first he had looked upon that divine
figure, thus mocked and tortured and crucified
of men, there had blazed up in the heart of the
dreamer such horror of the deed, such blind
fury of hatred against the doers, that he had
burned to hurl himself single handed against
them, sparing neither Jew nor Roman in his
vengeance and wrath.
But looking again upon that face, the
dreamer knew in his heart of hearts that had
there been only one man in the world when
Christ came and he that man his would
have been the sins which slew the Saviour,
144
Beyond the Door
his the blood-guilty hands that nailed those
sinless hands to the cross.
Not alone He hung, for Him, even on the
cross, the malice of His enemies pursued.
There is no human creature so lowly but for
once, and for a space, stands immeasurably
removed above his fellows, and is honoured
before them. For King Death comes once
only to the door of each subject, yet, be that
subject prince or pauper, courtier or clown, it
is meet that when the king comes, he comes
in state, and that to the man or woman, whom
he thus honours, shall be accorded some mea-
sure of the dignity which is due to them who
consort with kings. There is no one so lowly
of station, so meek of spirit, but in that awful
hour is wrapt about, in the eyes of others, with
the august arrogance of them who come to die ;
and that, even in death, the Christ should be
robbed of that last lone dignity, that isolate
distinction which death confers Him they
made but as one of a company of common
thieves and robbers, brought out to suffer
together one common and shameful fate.
The Face
This they did, knowing not that the manner
of Christ's death, in company with nameless
thieves, should for all time make that death
more wonderful and more memorable, and those
nameless thieves remembered by the world
when many of the world's kings and rulers
are forgotten. This they did, knowing not
that the presence of those thieves should
call from Him, who hung in their midst,
words which even in death proclaimed Him
King of Heaven and Lord of Life ; words
which, even to the end of the world, shall
remain humanity's surest pledge and promise
of eternal life.
Three figures there were, co-sufferers in that
last and most cruel agony comrades in death,
though in life such worlds apart yet was there
never a man or woman, witnessing that final
tragedy, who had eyes for any but the One.
For never had the Christ seemed so robed
in awful majesty as now when, naked and
bleeding, and mocked of all, with head erect
(the head that He was so soon of His own
accord to bow, in giving up the ghost) He
146
Beyond the Door
looked upon the company of His murderers, and
with lips whence issued nor sigh nor groan,
He prayed the prayer whereto this world and
this world's God shall never cease to listen :
" Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do."
Hearing these words, Hell shuddered, for
by these words Satan and his princes knew
that their kingdom had for ever slipped from
them.
In death, as in life, they had tried and
tempted the Holy One ; and in death, as in
life, Christ, the King and Captain of our
salvation, had conquered. To the last they
had hoped against hope for some word of
anger to man, of reproach to God, and now,
when the first word from the cross was uttered,
the word for which Satan and his host had
waited and watched, it was a prayer from the
Crucified One for God's forgiveness of His
murderers. ,
At that word Hell reeled, and gathered itself
together in one final and desperate effort.
Even as the cunning of Satan had caused
The Face
him to set a Judas among the disciples little
thinking, poor fool, that the witness, " I have
betrayed innocent blood ! " wrung thus reluc-
tantly, and in the sincerity of despair, from
that arch enemy and traitor, should for ever
echo down the ages, a more tremendous
testimony to the absolute sinlessness of Christ
than the witness of Christ's faithful disciples
and friends even so had the cunning of old
Satan caused him to set that tool and fool of
the devil, an unrepentant sinner, as Christ's
death-comrade and co-sufferer.
To man that is born of woman it is not
given always to walk with unfaltering feet.
Yet so long as the sinner hates his sin, so
long as he truly repents, and seeks new
strength from Heaven, so long is that sinner
the much-forgiven, dearly-loved child of God.
Such an one was he who hung on the
Saviour's right.
When, however, the sinner has sunk to such
depths of infamy as, for its own sake, to love
what is evil, for its own sake, to loathe what is
good when he cherishes in his heart such
148
Beyond the Door
hatred of God that he would, had he it in
his power, be guilty, in act as well as in
thought, of God-murder then is that sinner
in terrible straits.
Such an one had been he who hung on the
Saviour's left.
Was it by chance that there had been
permitted to suffer with the Christ two such
men as they who were set by His side? Yea,
but it was the "chance" which "Eternal God
did guide." For in all that Life of lives,
which was lived on the earth two thousand
years ago, there was no act, no occurrence,
but was pregnant with stupendous meaning,
with stupendous issues. And in that symbolic
trinity, the Christ and the two thieves, thus
strangely brought together on Calvary's Mount,
were to be seen the mystic spokesmen and
representatives of Human Nature, Satanic
Nature, and Divine Nature. Here was being
enacted a triple tragedy, so elemental, yet so
tremendous, that Earth, and Hell, and Heaven
were once, and for all time, met and mirrored
within a few square feet of ground.
149
The Face
And then it was that Hell and Satan,
brought to bay, made of the as yet impenitent
one, who hung on the Saviour's left, the mouth-
piece of Hell, whereby even now Hell hoped
to tempt the Saviour to His own undoing.
"If Thou be indeed the Christ, come down
from the cross and save Thyself and us."
But he who hung on the right rebuked the
reviler, and, looking to the Christ, cried out,
" Lord, remember me when Thou comest into
Thy kingdom."
Whereat the dreaming man, gazing upon
him who had so spoken, saw that it was his
own face which looked out at him from the
cross on the Saviour's right ; even as, were
it given to you, who read this story of his
dream, to see that scene as the dreaming man
saw it it would be your face which you would
then see, even as I, who write the story of the
dream, would see my own, the face of sinning,
suffering, repenting, forgiven, and redeemed
humanity.
God grant that when you and I come, as
come we must, in this world or the next, to
150
Beyond the Door
see that scene as the dreaming man saw it
God grant that it be not from the cross, which
was set at the Saviour's left, that your face and
my face shall look out then.
And, turning to the penitent one, the Christ
made answer : " This day thou shalt be with
Me in Paradise!"
Here was promise, considered, deliberate,
definite, and given by One who cannot lie.
Listening to these words the dreaming man
doubted no longer, for it was so that He who
is the Truth had spoken.
And, with these words ringing in his ears,
the wonder of the man's dream passed, and
he awoke awoke to the dull chill of the narrow
room, the dark fireplace, the dead fire awoke
to a yet more wonderful re-awakening, wherein
he should dream no more.
Suddenly the walls of the little room, wherein
he had slept and dreamed, widened, and fell
away. The black fireplace, the dead fire,
faded before his eyes.
Ah, God ! what meant that pain at his
heart, that strangling in his throat, the dark-
The Face Beyond the Door
ness that was closing around him ? His hands
clutched wildly at empty air, he fell back
then . . . light music child-laughter bird-
song, flower-fragrance and the abiding calm
of infinite and perfect peace.
And, ah! that sweet saint-face! how well
he remembered its pure Madonna oval! his
mother's. . . . Those deep, sad eyes under
the wide brows, crowned with silver the
father whom he had never ceased to mourn!
. . . Then, ah ! dear God, could it be true ?
already he was young and glad and strong
again those radiant eyes, that smile, that
voice the worshipped maiden of his man-
hood, his love, his wife, the mother of his
children, who had taken with her the sunshine
out of the world when she went . . . and, in her
arms, his and her little one, his lost darling !
And then, dearer, immeasurably, infinitely
dearer even than these, the face, the human face,
of his and their crucified Saviour and God !
And again those words : " This day thou
shalt be with Me in Paradise ! "
He was assured of Eternal Life.
152
G/
RDEN OFGCPD
A STORY FOR CHILDREN OF
EIGHT TO EIGHTY
IT was broad noonday in the garden, and so
hot that one could see the air palpitating
and quivering above the gravel paths in
undulant haze of heat. Even the butterfly
gasped for breath, and grumbled because the
swaying of the grasses set stirring a warm
puff, which was like the opening of an oven.
The sun seemed so near, and was trying so
hard to be hot, that the daisies said they
could see him spinning and panting as he
stood above them ; but that, I think, was
only their fancy, although it is true that he
was shining so exactly over-head, that there
was not a streak of shadow where one could
creep for shelter from the sweltering heat.
All thj flowers were parched and drooping,
and except for the passing buzz where a bee
155
The Garden of God
went drowsily by, or buried himself with a
contented burr in the heart of a pansy, not
a sound stirred the sultry silence.
All at once there was a sudden scurry
among the birds. A cat which had been
basking and purring in the sunshine, open-
ing and shutting an eye, every now and
then, to make believe that she was not
sleepy, had dropped off into a doze, and now
she awakened, yawning. This was the signal
for a general stir.
" Phew ! but it is hot, to be sure ! " ex-
claimed the butterfly, as he darted up for a
stretch from the poppy-head on which he
had been sitting, and went waltzing, angle-
wise, down the gravelled path of the garden,
lacing the long, green lines of the boxwood
with loops of crimson and gold.
" I hope my weight won't inconvenience
you," he said with airy politeness to the lily,
dropping himself lazily, and without waiting
for an answer, upon her delicate head, which
drooped so feebly beneath this new burden
that several scented petals fluttered fainting
The Garden of God
to the ground. " I am grieved to see you
looking so sadly," he continued, after he had
settled himself to his liking, " but what on
earth, my good soul, makes you lean forward
in that uncomfortable attitude ? There is a
charmingly shady spot under the shelter of
the wall behind you. Why don't you lean in
that direction ? As it is, you are going out
of your way to make yourself uncomfortable,
besides which I should very much prefer to
be out of the heat."
" I should be glad to move into the shade,"
said the lily gently, " but my sweetheart, the
rose, has fallen asleep by the border, and I
am leaning over her to keep the sun from
her buds."
" How very charming you are ! " lisped the
butterfly languidly, and in a tone of polite
contempt which seemed to imply, " And what
a fool!"
" But your ideas are a little crude, don't
you know ? " he went on, " though of course
interesting. It is easy to see you are not
a person of the world. When you have
157
The Garden of God
travelled about, and learnt as much as I
have, you will come to look at such things
in a different way."
" Yes, you have travelled, and lived in the
world, and seen a great deal," said the lily ;
" but I have loved; and it is by loving, as
well as by living, that one learns."
" Don't presume to lecture me ! " was the
impatient answer. " Fancy a flower finding
fault with a butterfly ! Don't you know that
I am your superior in the scale of being!
But, tell me, does this love of which you
speak bring happiness ? "
"The greatest of all happiness," whispered
the lily, almost to herself, and with infinite
tenderness her white bells seeming to light
up and overflow, like human eyes, as she
spoke. "To love truly, and to be loved, is
indeed to be favoured of heaven. All the
good things which this world contains are
not worthy to be offered in exchange for the
love of one faithful heart."
"Then I must learn to love," said the
butterfly decisively, " for happiness has
158
The Garden of God
always been my aim. Tell me how to
begin."
" You'll have to begin by unlearning," put
in a big double-dahlia, who was standing by
like a sentinel, and looking as stiff and
stuck-up as if he had just been appointed
flower-policeman to the garden."
" Don't you be afraid that any one's going
to fall in love with you," was the spiteful
rejoinder of the butterfly, edging himself
round and round on a lily-bell as he spoke.
"Your place, my good creature, is in the
vegetable garden, with the cauliflowers and
the artichokes. There is something distin-
guished about a white chrysanthemum, and
the single-dahlias are shapely, although they
do stare so ; but the double-dahlias ! " and
the butterfly affected a pretty shudder of
horror which made the double-dahlia stiffen
on his stem with rage.
"How dare you speak slightingly of my
family ! " he said indignantly. " And as for
those big chrysanthemums ! they're just like
tumbled heaps of worsted, or that shaggy-
The Garden of God
eyed skye-terrier dog that we see sometimes
in the garden untidy, shapeless, lumpy things
/ call them ! "
The butterfly, who had been alternately
opening and shutting his wings, as if he
thought the sight of such splendour was
too dazzling to be borne continuously, but
really because he knew that the sombre
tinting, which they displayed when closed,
heightened, by contrast, their gorgeous
colouring when open, was nothing if not
well-bred, so he simply pretended to stifle a
yawn in the dahlia's face, and to make
believe that he had not heard what was
said.
"After all," he said, turning his back
pointedly upon the dahlia, and shutting up
his wings with a final snap just as a fine
lady closes a fan "after all, my dear lily, I
don't know whether it's worth my while to
learn to love ; for, by this time next year,
you and I will be dead, and it will be all the
same then to us as if we had never loved, or
even lived at all."
1 60
The Garden of God
" I know nothing about death," replied the
lily, "but no one who loves can doubt im-
mortality, and if the rose and I are not
already immortal, I believe that our love
will make us so."
" What is this immortality ? " said the
butterfly. " I have heard the word used a
great deal in my wanderings, but I never
quite knew the meaning of it."
"It is the finding again, after death, of those
we have loved and lost ; and the loving and
living with them forever, I think," answered
his companion.
" I don't believe you know anything about
it," said the butterfly, decisively. "All the
men and women I've met and they ought
to know used ever so much longer
words."
" Perhaps you are right," replied the lily
quietly, bending forward to shield a stray
rose-bud from the burning sun, " but to be
forever with those I love would be immortality
enough for me. And I heard the maiden who
walks in the garden speaking yesterday, and I
161 M
The Garden of God
remember that she said it was more godlike
to love one little child, purely and unselfishly,
than to have a heart filled with a thousand
vast vague aspirations after things we cannot
understand."
162
II
How strangely still it was in the garden !
Summer had gone, and October was nearly
over, but the day had been so bright and
warm that every one said the winter must
be a very long way off. But since sunset
the air had been getting more and more chilly,
and the stars were glittering like cold steel^
and the moon looked so bright and large, that
the flowers, which had awakened with an icy
pain at their hearts, could scarcely believe
it was night and not day, for every tiny grass-
blade and buttercup stood out with startling
distinctness on the grass. A strange, sharp
scent was in the air, and a singular stillness
was abroad.
There was no " going " in the trees, nor
bough-swing among the branches, but all
The Garden of God
stood rigid and motionless as if intently
listening.
" Perhaps they are listening for the first
footfall of the winter the winter which is
coming to kill us," said the lily sadly, bending
down, as she spoke, to twine herself protect-
ingly around the rose.
" Perhaps we are dead already," said the
rose, with a shudder, " and are but ghost-
flowers in a ghostly garden. How cold and
wan my petals look in this pallid light !
And is this grey place blanched and silent
and still as death our sweet-scented and
sunny garden, that glowed with warm colour
and was astir with life ? "
Just then, and before the lily could answer,
they heard a sudden cry of pain.
It was the butterfly, who had fallen, half
dead with cold, from a sycamore bough, and
now lay shelterless and shivering on the frozen
path. " Creep up upon my leaves, dear butter-
fly," said the lily tenderly, as she bent towards
him, "and I will try and find a warm place for
you near my heart."
164
The Garden of God
" Oh, I'm so frightened! I'm so frightened!"
he sobbed. " The world is dying ; even now
the trees seem still and dead. Soon the stars
will fall out of the sky into the garden.
Shall we be left in darkness when the moon
is dead ? Already her face is deadly pale,
although she shines so brightly. And what
has come to the trees ? On every bough there
sparkle a thousand lights. Are they stars
which have dropped from the sky ? "
"They are not stars at all," said the lily,
bending over him and hushing him to her
heart as a mother hushes a frightened child,
"but diamonds for the Frost King's crown. I
think we shall die to-night. Are you asleep,
dear rose ? The end is coming. Let us meet
it waking, and in each other's arms."
" It is coming, dear heart, and coming soon,"
said the rose with a cry. " Already I can
scarcely speak for pain. The night grows ever
colder and more cold. And how strangely
bright the moon is ! What was that streak
of silver across the sky? A star which has
fallen from its place ? "
165
The Garden of God
" I think it was the shining angel God sends
to fetch us," answered the lily. " Dear love,
the end will soon be here. Already the
pain has reached my heart; already I begin
to die."
"And I, too," said the rose. "I sink I
faint the sharp pain stings and bites ! Hold
me fast, darling! I scarce can see you
now."
" Nor I you, sweetheart ! "
" Hold me closer closer. Everything seems
to fall away."
" Everything but love, dearest, and where
love is, all is. At least we shall die to-
gether."
Icier and more icy grew the air ; brighter
and whiter shone the moonlight on the garden,
until the sunflower's shadow lay like ebony
upon silver along the grass ; colder and more
steely glittered the stars, and closer crept the
pain to the heart of the dying flowers. All
the long night through the silent trees stood
rigid and motionless, but now they listened no
longer, for winter was come indeed, and on
166
The Garden of God
every branch the frost-crystals glinted and
sparkled.
And when morning dawned, the butterfly
lay dead for ever, but the lily and the rose
were the fairest flowers a-bloom in the Garden
of God.
\
167
THE
CMLDHTHE
WISE* MAN '&}
THE!
AN
WO)
DEVll
PROEM
1 DREAMT that I stood within the walls
of a great city. Under the deep, dense
blue of an Italian sky, innumerable towers,
domes, temples, and palaces, glittered and
whitened like headstones bleaching in a
cemetery in the morning sunshine ; and high
overhead soared the cross-crowned cupola of
a huge cathedral.
And in the streets and squares of the city,
I beheld the vastest concourse which the eye
of man has ever witnessed. People of every
race and every nation swarmed, ant-like, in
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The Child, the Wise Man
house and street; and when I looked beyond
the city's limits, I saw that the country, for
many miles around, was thick with tents and
pavilions, so that the place had become, as it
were, the camping ground of nations.
Then, turning to one who stood near me, I
said, " Surely this is Rome, the Eternal City? "
"It is," he made answer.
"And yonder church," I said, "is it not the
church of Saint Peter ? "
" It has so been called ot old," he re-
sponded, "but it is called so now no longer."
"What, then, call they it?" I asked.
" The Church of the ONE GOD," replied the
man.
Then said I, " Tell me, I pray you, why
the name has been so changed, and whaj
means this multitude, for I am but newly
arrived in the city."
Looking at me curiously, the man made
answer, "Whence come you, that you know
not they have found the body of the Christ ? "
Then said I : " Nay, that were impossible,
for we know that our Saviour Christ was
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and the Devil
crucified, and buried. And that He rose
again the third day, according to the Scrip-
ture, and ascended into heaven, where He
sitteth on the right hand of the Father."
But he answered me sternly, " It is true
that the man, whom you call the Saviour
Christ, did claim for Himself that He, being
equal with God, was not subject unto death,
but would rise again the third day. And it
is true, too, that because His body was not
found, His disciples gave out that He had so
risen and ascended. Wherefore Him the
world hath most idolatrously worshipped,
according unto a mortal the glory which
belongs only unto GOD. Which idolatry
God has for nineteen hundred years endured
patiently, visiting not their evil-doing upon
the heads of the idolaters, but waiting until,
in the fulness of time, He might put to scorn
the pretensions of the crucified Nazarene, and
make manifest the abundance of God's mercy
and the magnitude of man's sinning.
" For know you, that they have found in
Palestine, in the rock-hewn sepulchre whither
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it was borne nineteen hundred years ago by
Joseph of Arimatheea, the body of Him who
claimed that death had no dominion over
Him."
Then said I, " And has any, for this reason,
forsaken Christ ? "
"You see how many people are here gathered
together ? " he made answer. " Think you it is
in the power of any man to number them ? "
" As well might one seek to number the
stars in the heavens, the sand on the sea-
shore ! " I replied.
Then said he, "You speak truly. Here,
for the first time, the monarchs of every nation
which has held the Christian faith are, with
their courts and councils, their lords spiritual
and temporal, gathered together. Know you
why they are met ? "
" I know not," I answered.
Then said he, "They are here to make
solemn confession, on their own behalf, and
on behalf of the people over whom they rule,
of the iniquity of which they and their fore-
fathers have been guilty, in that they have
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and the Devil
bowed the knee to a mortal, worshipping as
God of God, Light of Light, Very God of
Very God, one who was of flesh and blood,
and subject unto death, as we all are. They
are met to make public and solemn renuncia-
tion of their error. To-day, at noon, in yonder
church, and in every church throughout the
world where Christ has been worshipped as
God, Christ shall be renounced and proclaimed
man ; the symbols of the Trinity and of the
Cross shall be cast down and destroyed, that
thereby all men may know that God is not
Three but One.
"If you will, you shall come with me to
yonder cathedral, where I will show you this
great ceremony, that you may believe for your-
self that Jesus of Nazareth was a deceiver."
But I made answer : " Though you show
me this and more, though, like Thomas, I
behold the wounds in the hands and feet, and
thrust my finger into the pierced side, yet will
I not believe that Jesus, my Lord and Master,
was a deceiver, for I know in Whom I have
trusted. Rather, will I believe that this thing,
The Child, the Wise Man
of which you speak, is one of those wiles of
Satan, of which we have been warned in Holy
Writ : how that in the latter days there
should arise * false prophets,' whose * coming
is after the working of Satan, with all power
and signs and lying wonders,' that they who
serve not the truth should ' believe a lie.' '
Then said the man, " It is childish to refuse
to believe the evidence of one's senses, as
childish as it is to be satisfied with so outworn
a creed as yours."
"Were I to judge by sense," I made answer,
" I should believe that I see the sun, at a
moment when he is actually below the
horizon, and when I know that it is but his
reflected image, and not himself, which I see.
And to be satisfied with the Christian faith
may be childlike, but is not childish ; for
though the child may find in it all he needs,
yet many of the wisest of this world have
confessed that the longer they have pondered
it, the closer they have studied it, the more
cause have they found for wonder, for worship,
and for love. The great minds of the world
and the Devil
the Shakespeares and Miltons of the race
are on our side, not on yours, and for the very
reason that they were great ; for the reason
that they were wise, and did not merely think
themselves so. It is true that ours is the
simplest of all faiths. It must needs be so,
since it appeals alike to rich and to poor, to
the young and to the old, to the sick and to
the strong; and not less to the sempstress
in her garret, who, when she lays down the
work at which she has been toiling early and
late, is too weary-eyed and worn to take up
a book, or even to think, than to the woman
of fashion, or to the man of leisure who has
devoted his life to the search for knowledge.
Were it not so, and were the strength of its
appeal only proportionate to the intellectual
capacity of the individual, then half humanity
the half which needs Him most would be
left without the help and hope which are given
freely by the Great Consoler. And yet, not-
withstanding its simplicity, I believe that,
could we stand with God at the centre of all
things, we should see that the one supreme
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The Child, the Wise Man
and controlling Law the pivot upon which
the laws of this and all other universes turn
is the law of vicarious sacrifice, the law which
had ordained, ere the foundations of the world
were laid, that the sins of the world should be
borne by God's Son, the sinless Christ."
Then said the man derisively, " He of whom
you speak as the Son of God, was but the
child of Mary and Joseph the Carpenter. If
He claimed to be other than this, He spoke
a lie."
" Surely you have no child of your own,"
I made answer, " that you can so speak of
Him Who consecrated childhood for ever by
His own divine Childhood, who consecrated
it afresh, with a higher, holier meaning, when,
in His Divine Manhood, He uttered those
words, which, to the ears of every mother of,
to-day, are as full of sweet music, as ever they
were to the mothers of Palestine : ' Suffer the
little children to come unto Me, and forbid them
not, for of such is the kingdom of Heaven.' '
Then said the man, " All this is nothing to
me, who have neither wife nor child."
and the Devil
"That I can well believe," I answered, "for
surely no father, no mother whether the little
one were on earth or in heaven could hear
the sweet music of those words unmoved.
That picture of the little child nestling as
naturally, as trustfully, in our Saviour's arms,
as in the arms of her mother, and smiling up
with perfect love, perfect confidence, into the
face which looked down upon hers with Divine
tenderness, Divine Fatherliness though, for
His ears, no child-lips might ever lisp the
wonderful word ' Father ' has consecrated
all children to the Christ, and the Christ
to every child. It must remain, for all
time, the one picture of spotless purity upon
which human eye has looked that inter-
change of loving smiles between the innocent
child and the sinless Man. So long as
that picture is guarded in the heart of one
mother, so long you can never hope to
destroy Christianity. That little child, in the
arms of Jesus, has struck deadlier blows at
the enemies of the Cross than all the argu-
ments of all the theologians. That child is
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The Child, the Wise Man
the most powerful foe whom the armies of
unbelief have to fear."
Even as I spoke, there came the sudden
roll of cannon.
" It is the signal for the procession to start,"
said my companion ; and over that great
assembly there passed a tremor of expectancy,
like the stirring of leaves when rain is
nigh.
Afar off we heard a vibrating hum like the
droning of insects on a sunny summer's noon ;
and the sound moved me strangely, for I knew
it was the distant voice of a mighty multitude.
Sometimes it died away, as the chiming of
bells dies away when the wind falls, and then
it swelled again until the hum was as the
murmur of an incoming tide, and soon it was
like the roar of breakers upon the shore, so
that we could hear the blare of trumpets,
blending with the drums' monotonous beat,
and the cheers rippling along the lines like
volleying bells.
And then, slow-moving to stately music,
there came into view a procession of supreme
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splendour. Monarch after monarch, Kaiser
and Czar, Emperors, Kings, and Queens,
arrayed in royal robes, and surrounded by
their courts and counsellors, passed by in
state, on their way to the cathedral. And as
sovereign succeeded to sovereign, pageant to
pageant, there went up, from that vast assem-
bly, such thunder of applause, that the thread of
my dream was broken, and the scene shifted as
it were by magic, and in a moment.
I was no longer in the streets, where all
Rome was ringing with the riotous uproar, but
kneeling one of innumerable thousands in
the great cathedral. A rolling, as of thunder,
was still in my ears, but I knew it now for the
rolling of the organ, and I heard it sink, and
sink, until it was lost in listening silence, out of
which arose the voice of one leading the people
in prayer :
<4 Almighty Father, the ONE GOD of heaven
and earth and Judge of all men We do most
humbly beseech Thee to look pitifully upon us,
Thy people, who by following after the Deceiver,
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Jesus, and according unto a man the worship
which pertaineth only to God, have committed
grievous idolatry against Thy Divine Majesty,
and are deserving only of Thy just wrath and
fiery condemnation. We do most earnestly
repent, and humbly implore that Thou wilt
mercifully grant us Thy forgiveness, and keep
us evermore in the faith and fear of the ONE
GOD, Who liveth and reigneth world without
end. Amen."
Then, while the vast congregation remained
kneeling, the kings and rulers arose, one by one,
and, divesting themselves of their royal robes,
walked with bowed heads, and knelt before the
altar, in sight of all, that they might make
solemn intercession, on their own behalf, and
on behalf of their people, for the sin of which
the nations had been guilty.
And after these great ones of the earth had
so remained for some minutes, he, who led the
congregation in prayer, turned to the kneeling
multitude, saying :
" Do you for evermore renounce the Deceiver
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and the Devil
who, claiming that he had come to take away
the sins of the world, has laid upon the
world the burden of nineteen hundred years'
idolatry ? "
And, as with one voice, kings and people
made answer :
" We renounce him for evermore."
Then, like an overcharged bosom upgathered
in a sob, the swelling dome of the great cathe-
dral gave utterance to a sullen, sudden, rever-
berant note of woe the death-knell of a God
and, at the sound, a strange hush, which was
not silence, but palpitated, as it were, with
the pent-up breathing and tumultuous heart-
beating of a multitude, fell upon the as-
sembly.
And he who stood at the altar reached for-
ward, and took from its place, over the table
of God, the image of the crucified Christ.
Turning to the people, he held it, upraised, for
a moment before them.
Then crying out : " The reign of the
Christ is at end. The ONE GOD reigneth
and is worshipped evermore," he dashed it
The Child, the Wise Man
down into atoms on the marble pavement at
his feet.
And, out in the sunlight the cannon thun-
dered, and from a hundred steeples the bells of
Rome burst forth into exultant song, that all
men might know the Religion of Sorrow was
ended, the Reign of Joy was begun.
184
I
IN my dream I looked down upon the world,
and I saw that the world was in darkness, save
for the light which streamed from an upraised
Cross.
And I saw that the light which shone from
the Cross made manifest the very heaven of
heavens, so that even while men trod the dark
and thorny ways of the world, they might at
any time look up, and see above them the
loving Father-face of God.
And some I saw who, kindling little candles,
of their own making, at the beacon-fire of the
Cross, cried out, " Come, see the light we have
found ! Here is light, compared to which all
other lights are as darkness ! "
Others said : " See how light it is ! This
is the light of day. Why stands yonder Cross
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in the sunshine, to throw its gloomy shadow
over the world? Come let us pull it down,
that we may be no longer saddened by the
symbol of eternal sorrow."
As they so spoke, the light from the
Cross suddenly faded out, and with it all the
little lights that had been kindled at its fire,
leaving the world in darkness, utter and
complete.
And I heard the voice of God saying : " Lo !
I have given unto mankind the most precious
gift I had to bestow.
" The creature can at no time be equal with
its Creator, and as man may not become God,
God, out of the great love He bore the world,
was willing to become man. Wherefore the
High and Holy One Who inhabiteth eternity,
did for man's sake, humble Himself to become
a helpless babe, to live man's life, to share
man's sorrows, and to die man's death, that
henceforth, for every man, life might lose its
loneliness and death its horror, for God was
become not only man's Maker and Judge, but
also man's divine Comrade and Brother.
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and the Devil
" And now, in these latter days, this divinest
of gifts this sacrifice of Himself by the
Creator, for the sake of His creature is,
by that creature, rejected and scorned. The
most sacred and solemn of all mysteries is
become a thing of which men make mock,
denying, because of the very humanity which
for their sakes He had stooped to share the
divinity which was His, ere He had called
humanity into being.
"They speak of their risen and ascended
Saviour as a dead dreamer, or a vain deceiver,
declaring that Christianity is an outworn creed,
a thing of yesterday, and the story of the
Divine Man, a fable, fit only for the ears of
a child."
And God spoke again saying :
" O faithless and godless generation! O
mockers of good and workers of iniquity ! have
I not already borne with you over-long ? Day
by day have I stood knocking at your door,
entreating you to accept a gift which, were it
not offered freely, you would count life itself
well spent to win. And day by day you have
The Child, the Wise Man
thrust Me out, and driven Me forth as you
would thrust away a thief or a beggar from
your door.
" But now behold ! I come to you no more.
You at whose door your God Himself has
so long stood, entreating entrance vainly shall
knock, unheeded, at the Door of Life. Out of
your own mouth shall proceed your judgment.
You have said that there is no Christ; that He
who came to bear away the sin of the world,
and, by His glorious resurrection from the
dead, to bring unto all men the gift of eternal
life, was either deceived, or a deceiver, who
lies, and has lain, these two thousand years, in
His unknown and unhonoured grave in Pales-
tine. It is thus that you have spoken, and by
your own words shall come your condemnation.
" I, who gave, can take away. I, who made,
can unmake. Let be. ... It is as you say.
. . . There is no Christ."
And as God so spoke, it seemed to me that
He wiped out as a child wipes out an un-
finished sum from a slate all that the great
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name of Jesus means, and has meant to
humanity.
For one instant, I saw, shining down the
dark vista of the ages, the supreme figure of
the Divine Man. Below me, as on a midnight
plain, that stretched away into infinite dark-
ness, lay the wounded in life's battle the
widowed, the orphaned, the friendless, the sick,
the halt, and the sin-bound. And I saw that
it was this one divine and shining figure, the
very Light of the World, to which all hands
were uplifted, upon which every eye was
fixed. I saw the Christ look down upon His
suffering creatures with eyes from which
streamed tears of tender and pitying love ; I
heard the great and yearning cry which rose
to His lips at sight of their sorrows ; I saw
Him stretch forth His arms to them, as a
mother stretches forth her arms to her stricken
child, and then the sublime and lonely figure
of the Man of Sorrows faded out for ever, and
upon helpless, hopeless, sin-stained and suffer-
ing humanity, darkness and despair descended,
like vultures descending upon their prey.
189
II
YET again I dreamed a dream in which
pictures came and went as in a glass.
I looked down upon a Christless world, and
I saw that though the same sun made glad the
morning, the same stars made beautiful the
night, the men and women, who dwelt thereon,
were become haggard, restless and unhappy.
Some few there were who sat together, laugh-
ing feverishly, but there was no mirth in their
laughter, for their faces were anxious and per-
turbed, and even while they laughed, they cast
uneasy glances about them, as if fearing to be
surprised by an unseen foe. I saw, too, that
they who had protested that the bread and
wine of the Gospel was a mouthful they could
not swallow, ate greedily of strange meats
which came from other altars, or which were
prepared by the hands of the high priests of
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The Child, the Wise Man
a new philosophy. They who declared that
reason would not allow them to believe that
God could once become Incarnate, saw no
reason to doubt the manifold Re-incarnations
of Man. They who complained that they
found the straight and level highway of
Christianity too difficult a road for them to
follow, or that there was no sure foothold
thereon, were content to lose themselves
among the mazes of superstition, or to flounder
and stumble among the stony wastes of un-
belief.
Many I saw who wandered backward and
forward aimlessly, as if seeking for some-
thing which they found not. At times one
would cry out, " Lo, I have it ! " and the
others would cease their search, and run
with gladness to hear him. But so often as
one thus called out, so often they, who ran,
would return whence they came, unsatisfied
and unfilled, until not a few ceased to give
ear at all.
Then said I to one who passed by, " For
what seek you?"
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The Child, the Wise Man
" For the answer to the Riddle of Life," he
replied.
" Why trouble yourself about things which
are too great for you ? " I said. " Do as
others do. Eat, drink, marry, beget chil-
dren, and be merry. You can wait to
know the answer to the riddle, till the day
when you must go behind the Great Dark
to seek it for yourself. That day is, how-
ever, as yet far distant. Your years are not
many, and, haply, you have still a long time to
live."
But the man made answer : " What we call
1 time ' is but a single sunray thrown across the
infinite void of Eternity, and ' life ' is but the
floating-flicker of a mote that vanishes, even as
it becomes visible therein. What matters it,
then, to the mote in the sunbeam whether it be
a minute or a moment drifting across the ray
from dark to dark ? It is not because I fear
whatever the future has for me, personally, of
good or ill that I seek to read Life's Riddle
aright. It is because I have a wife whom I
love, a child that I worship, and the thought
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and the Devil
that one day any day death may part us,
never, perhaps, to set eyes on one another
again, haunts me, holds me, and makes exist-
ence a very hell. It were horror enough to
lose a dear one, even were we sure that those
who love each other here, shall hereafter love
each other, and be together again. But even
that much of certainty has been denied us, for
Death closes, in the face of the living, the door
through which he has hurried their beloved
dead."
"You, and those you love, are, at least
whether living or dead in the hand of God,"
I said.
"What know you of God?" asked the
man.
" That He is great," I made answer.
" So great that He cares neither for me nor
mine," said the man bitterly. "Who am I,
that God should trouble Himself concerning
me? Why should I, who am but one among
many millions of men whom He has made, be
of more account to Him than one egg in the
belly of the herring which He has made also?
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The Child, the Wise Man
If the egg become a fish, it is well : if it be
destroyed or devoured, it is well, equally. So,
too, with the man. God has set the sun in
the sky to warm him by day, the moon and
stars to companion him by night. God says to
him, ' I have done My part, and done it well.
The way is clear for you. Go forth, now,
to fare for yourself, to sorrow or to be glad,
to be hungry or to be full, to be sick or
to be strong, to live or to die, as may chance
to you.'"
Then said I, "One Who cannot lie has
told us that the very hairs of our head are
numbered, and that not a sparrow shall fall,
and be forgotten before the Father."
" Whom mean you ? " asked the man.
"The Christ of God," I made answer.
Then said the man sadly, "Christ! There
is no Christ. Would God there were ! Until
I ceased to believe in the Christ, I realised not
that, except through Him, we know no more
of the Ruler of the Universe, than did he who
of old complained, ' Canst thou by searching,
find out God?'
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and the Devil
" Except God reveal Himself to man, man
knows not what God is, nor whether God be,
at all.
"Once I believed that God had so revealed
Himself, and then this earth was the ante-
chamber to heaven. Now it is but a prison,
whence there is no escape a prison in which
we are held captive at the will of an Unknown
Gaoler. What matters it to me that the earth
be beautiful ? What matters it to the prisoner
that his cell be painted, when he knows that
the skeleton-hand of Death, the executioner,
may at any moment drag him forth from the
dear companionship of his loved ones, and
hustle him or them away to an unknown fate ?
While I believed that God had through Christ
revealed Himself, every soul on earth was
sacred to me. We were members of one
divine family. We were brothers and sisters
in our Brother- Lord and Redeemer. Now, we
are but fellow-victims who are flung to life's
lions together in the same arena. Then, our
very bereavements were sanctified to us. Sor-
row was God's accolade. It was the sword
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The Child, the Wise Man
stroke which bade us arise God's knights,
ready ever to draw sword in His service.
But now we have no such call to nobility,
for each lives to himself. We are no longer
knights, banded together in a noble cause, but
units in a mob, scrambling and fighting, one
with the other, for the trinkets which are
tossed to us by our capricious mistress,
Fate.
"When I believed that God Himself had
stooped to share our joys and our sorrows,
human life was made evermore beautiful and
divine. Then the very earth beneath our feet
was sacred, since He had trodden it ; then was
this robe of flesh, which He had worn, a white
garment that, for His dear sake, we must keep
unspotted from the world. Then did Art and
Song, picture and poem, sunrise and sunset,
and the play of evening light upon the sea,
combine in one divine conspiracy to urge us
heavenward ; then not a flower in the field,
not a face in the street, but called us to a
higher and holier life. But now our life !
but what matters our life ? If Christ be
196
and the Devil
not ; if God be not as Christ revealed
Him"
I heard no more, for the man had passed
on to seek elsewhere for the answer to the
Riddle of Life.
197
Ill
IN my dream I beheld yet another picture
of the Christless world.
A woman lay dying in a garret, and to her
came one who was very wise, saying, " You
have sent for me, because you would have
word with me ere you die. If you know
aught which concerns me, or if there is any
matter upon which I can advise you, speak
now, and I will give heed."
And the woman said : " I was but a girl
vain and foolish, perhaps, but with no thought
of evil when evil befell me.
" I have done evil since, and by my own
choosing, but God, Who is my Judge, knows
that I fell into that first folly scarce knowing
what I did, save that I trusted the man to
whom my heart was given.
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The Child, the Wise Man
" But evil is like the sea, and has no pity
on the foolish or the ignorant. Just as deep
water sucks under, and swallows up the child
who has accidentally fallen into it, while it
bears harmlessly upon its bosom the man who
has learnt to swim, so the young man or
maiden, who ventures into evil ignorantly,
is swallowed up and drawn under, while
others who seek vice deliberately, may, at
least, evade if only by their very knowledge
of evil the outward penalty of their sin. I
slipt into sin unthinkingly, as a child might
slip from an unguarded place into deep water ;
and my sin was like the dead weight of wet
clothes about the drowning child, dragging
me down and down until the waters closed
over my head. Some, at whose door I
knocked when I set out to seek the work
which should keep my baby and myself in
bread drew back their skirts, as if my very
touch were contamination, and bade me be-
gone, for a wanton. Others spoke kindly
and pitifully, and would have sent me to a
' Home for the Fallen,' but I told them that
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The Child, the Wise Man
it was work, not charity, which I needed, and
that, if they would but give me employment,
they should find me a diligent servant, and
true. But they shook their heads, and said
it was sad, very sad, and they were sorry.
This one excused herself because she feared
to seem to encourage immorality ; a second
hesitated to receive me into her household
lest she should give offence to those who were
already serving her. Others spoke uneasily
of * brothers ' or ' sons/ and though many
pitied me, and some offered me money, each
was anxious to pass me on.
" It seemed to me then, in my despair, as it
all women were either heartless or cowardly,
and all men vile ; and, as that which I
had lost could never be regained, I asked
myself of what use was it to continue the
hopeless struggle whether it were worse to
go clad in a garment of vice, than to slink
from door to door, scarce covered by the rags
of what had once been virtue.
" I need not tell you the familiar story.
Let me hasten on to say that, while I was
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and the Devil
leading a life of shame with no hope in
this world or in the next I met with an
accident in the street, and was carried to a
hospital, where, while I was recovering, the
good Sister, who tended me, talked much and
lovingly of the Christ."
" It is ever so with these Christians," said
the wise man, interrupting her. " A sick
woman is sent to them to be healed in the
body, and they let slip .no opportunity of
seeking to entice her away to follow after
superstition."
Then said the woman : " How comes it,
then, that you, who deny Christ, have built
no hospital of your own, to which to send
your sick ? "
But the wise man was silent.
Then said the woman, turning on him
fiercely : " What have you to give me in
return for the faith you have taken from me ?
Is there any hope for such as I, save in the
Cross of Christ? I was despised of all, a
thing of shame at which the very children
of the street old, alas ! in the knowledge of
201
The Child, the Wise Man
evil pointed the finger of scorn ; and ONE
came to me, speaking me gently and lovingly,
and greeting me, the outcast, with such
greeting as is accorded only to women whom
men honour. He came to me, in my despair,
to bid me hope ; He came to me in my degra-
dation, to bring me back my self-respect.
" And when I said, ' Lord, it is too late !
I have sinned away the very soul of me, and
can never be pure again/ He made answer,
1 Believe it not, daughter. It is devils' doc-
trine, even though they teach it in My
name. You can never regain your inno-
cence, for innocence (which is often but
another name for ignorance) is a flower that
once plucked, a vase that once broken, can
never be the same again. But purity is not
of earth, but of heaven. It is a white star
set in the sky a star which makes pure the
soul of all who look thereon steadfastly and
with longing/
"Then said I, 'Yes, Lord, but though I
have striven oh, so despairingly! to clamber
out of the black and seething abyss into which
202
and the Devil
I have fallen, the burden of my sin is ever
a clog around my neck to drag me back and
down to more shameful depths.'
" But He made answer, * Even now, I lift
the burden from your shoulders to Mine. That
you may be set free from your sins, and the
consequences of your sins, I bear, and have
borne, the burden of eternal sorrow.'
"And I said, ' Yes, Lord. Yet can I never
undo the past. The soul of me is black and
corrupt, and foul as with leprosy, and not all
the waters of the world can wash me clean
again.'
" But He made answer, * You can never
undo the past, but / can, and will ; and though
your soul be as black as you say, yet can I
make it whiter than the newly-fallen snow.'
" And I said, ' Yes, Lord, but I am weak
weaker and more unstable than water. Not
once, but ten thousand times, have I risen
from the mire, and striven, with all 'the
strength that was in me, to walk without
stumbling. And not once, but ten thousand
times, have I found myself low-grovelling in
203
The Child, the Wise Man
the mire again. And now I have neither
heart nor hope to continue the unequal contest.
The sins that I have committed in the past,
those sins shall I go on committing to my life's
end, for I know myself too well not to know
my own weakness, and my inability to resist
temptation.'
" And He made answer, * Though your
stumblings were twenty times ten thousand,
yet so long as you will but arise after each
fall, so long will I have for you in My heart
an especial tenderness. And if you will but
come to Me, saying, " Lord, I bring to Thee
my sin, and I bring to Thee, too, mine inability
to resist sin. Help Thou me, for in myself
there is no help," then will I abide with you
by day and by night, then will I fight with
you and for you, until My strength has made
you strong, and you have learned to loathe
the sins which now you love, and so shall
come to conquer them for yourself.' '
"And did you believe all this?" inquired
the wise man.
" I did," the woman answered.
204
and the Devil
"You were easily comforted," said he. "But
what has it to do with me ? "
"You shall hear," replied the woman.
" This, of which I have told you, happened
years ago, and, from that time forward, I
turned my back on my old life. At first, I and
my babe were like to starve, but at last I
found honest work for my hand to do, and
at that I toiled diligently, seeking to make
amends for the past, and to follow after Him
who had done such wondrous things for me.
" But, not long since, there came upon me
a great temptation. The man, for whose sake
I had first sinned, found me out, and told me
that he loved me, and had long ago sought for
me, to make me his wife. He said that the
woman whom he had married, when he gave
up all hope of finding me, was his wife in name
only. He said that if I would but go to him
I and his child, for he had no other child of
his own he would make our little one's future
his care, and would watch over us, and work
for us to his life's end."
" And what did you ? " asked the wise man.
205
The Child, the Wise Man
" I sent him away, telling him that I must
have time to consider. And when he was
gone, I left my home, and fled, with my little
one, where he could no longer find me."
" Why so ? " inquired the wise man.
11 Because I loved him, as we women God
help us ! sometimes love the men whom we
have most cause to hate," cried the woman
passionately. " But though I fled thus, from
the temptation to which I dared not trust
myself, my empty, aching heart cried out for
him, day and night, till I grew to loathe the
very sunshine that shone upon a world where
he and I were parted ; and but for the fact that I
could not so sin against the command of Jesus,
my Master, I had cast my scruples to the wind,
and gone to the man I loved.
" And then it was, at this supreme crisis in
my life, when all my world was unsettled, and
when I most needed help and strength from
without, that your book, in which you seek to
destroy humanity's faith in the Saviour, was
put into my hand. My heart told me that its
teaching was false, but it is easy to believe the
206
and the Devil
thing we wish to believe ; and so it came
about that I tried to persuade myself that your
arguments were unanswerable, and to persuade
myself, also, that my faith was shaken, and
that as I no longer believed in the Christ, I
need no longer count myself subject to His
command.
11 It is thus that we men and women palter
with our conscience, declaring that our life is
the outcome of our creed, whereas our creed
is too often the outcome of our life.
" I need tell you no more, except that I was
saved from the sin I would have committed by
the death of him, for love of whom I would
once more have sinned.
"But from the man or woman who has
played false with conscience, a dreadful
reckoning is ever exacted. I had strangled
the voice of God within me, as a woman
strangles the cry in the throat of the child
whose voice, were it heard, would make known
her shame. And now, though I would believe
again, I cannot, for the heart of me is dead,
is dead, and I have sent for you you who are
207
The Child, the Wise Man
so wise to ask what you have to give me
a dying woman in place of the faith I have
lost?"
But the wise man was silent, and when next
I looked, he was gone, and the woman lay
dead.
208
IV
ONCE more, in my dream, I saw, as in a glass,
a picture of a Christless world.
A strong man, the working of whose face
was terrible to behold, stood, in impotent
anguish, looking down upon the death-throes
of his only child. The little figure which had
been wont to leap with joy at sight of him ;
that he had many times caught up (oh ! so
tenderly!) to toss at arm's length aloft, or to
carry bundle-wise in his arms, that he and she
might be the first to welcome the new rose
just opened in the garden, lay with her limbs
drawn up like the claws of a dead bird to
her body.
The shining curls, yellow as fine spun flax,
soft as thistle-down, were damp and dull with
the dews of death. And oh! the poor, pinched,
suffering little face that had so often lain against
209 p
The Child, the Wise Man
his ! Oh ! the grey shadows around the eyes,
which had looked sometimes into his eyes, as
if they saw down into his soul, as over the
brink of a well ; as if that little child had
been God's Sentry, set to guard the gates of
the Kingdom of the Pure. How often before
the challenging " Stand and make answer!"
of those eyes, the questioning " Thus am I.
Say now what art thou ? " had his own eyes
fallen!
And now he must stand by with idle,
helpless hands while the fingers of an invisible
enemy are, minute by minute, strangling the
life-breath in that little throat.
She is gone. . . . He is childless. . . . The
baby life, to have saved which he would have
laid down his own life gladly, is at end. The
ittle soul, which was dearer to him than his
own soul's hope of immortality, is fled. And
as the terrible realisation of his loss comes over
him, the old faith of his childhood reasserts
itself for one moment, and, falling upon his
knees, the stricken father-heart prays aloud in
his anguish :
210
and the Devil
" Lord Jesus, Lover of little children ! Take
Thou my little maid. If she be with Thee, all
is well. Guard her, dear Lord, till I come to
Thee for her."
And then he remembers that there is no
Jesus, it may be even that there is no God,
and that he knows no more of what has become
of that little life, which owed its being to his
life, than he knows of the bubble that bursts
with the breaking wave. And despair takes
him.
But in heaven I saw the Divine Figure
of the Man of Sorrows; and lo! on His bosom
lay the little child.
And, looking down with streaming eyes upon
the childless father, the Christ cried out, as
in the days when He had walked the fields of
Palestine :
" O ! My people ! My people ! whom I have
carried in My heart, as a mother carries her
unborn babe beneath her bosom ! O brother !
O sister ! at sight of whose sorrow this soul of
Mine has uttered a more terrible cry than any
211
The Child, the Wise Man
cry thou hast uttered for a sight of the loved
faces thou hast lost !
" How often would I have comforted thee !
How often would I have gathered thee to My
heart, as now I gather this little one, and
thou wouldst not.
" Yet though thou wilt not bear My Cross,
I may, and will, for ever, bear thine, even as I
bear away from thee the burden of all thy sins.
" And though thou hast forsaken and denied
Me utterly, yet will I never forsake thee to all
eternity ! "
And on earth the wise men sat and smiled
to think how wise they were, and that by
their wisdom they had for ever destroyed the
Religion of Sorrow.
.*
And, in the Kingdom of Darkness, Satan
sat smiling to himself, and at them ; for though
he knew he was very wise, he knew, too, that
many a little child is wiser than himself or
than they.
212
'A<PLOST@SOUl
A WOMAN, who was very fair, lay with
her new-born babe at her bosom ;
and as she lay, a Spirit, clad in
shining robes, appeared unto her, saying :
" Look, that thou mayest behold the Birth
of a Soul ! "
Then the woman looked, and saw, as
through a silver mist, a realm whether far-
off or near, she knew not over which there
rested a light as serene as that of moonlight
softened by clouds.
Many forms she saw therein, among which
was one that was like unto her own babe.
Then turning to the Spirit, she said : " What
place is this ? and whose is yonder child ? "
The Spirit made answer : " The place
which thou seest is the Abode of Souls, and
the child is the soul of thine own babe."
2I 5
A Lost Soul
But the woman laughed, saying : " That
may not be, seeing that my child is alive,
and lies even now upon my bosom. It were
more easy for thee to persuade me that the
thing which I behold is my own soul, than
that it is the roul of my child ! "
"What, then, is the thing which thou
callest thy 'soul'?" asked the Spirit.
" I cannot tell," replied the woman.
Then said the Spirit : " Whenever a
human being is born into the world, there
is born in the Abode of Souls that human
being's spiritual counterpart. Thy soul abidest
there, as does the soul of every other human
creature ; and as is the growth of thy body
on earth, so is the growth of thy soul in the
Abode of Souls."
" Myself is where my body is, and there
only," said the woman; "and if, as thou
sayest, there is elsewhere another self which
thou callest my 'soul,' then is that other self
not truly I."
But the Spirit made answer : " Thy soul
is more truly thyself than thou art, for thy
216
A Lost Soul
soul is what thou really art. The thing
which I see before me, which thou callest
thyself, is but what thou seemest to be. Thy
outward and bodily self may be white and
fair, but if thine inner and real self be evil
and unclean, then will thy soul be evil and
unclean to look upon, so that thou shalt be
known even as thou art. The thing which
thou didst in public, calling upon all men to
witness, shall not be more manifest than the
thing which thou didst steal away in secret
to commit. Thou didst double-lock thy
chamber-door, that none might see thee, but
I tell thee that every deed thou doest in the
body nay, not only every deed which thou
doest, but the most secret thought of thine
inmost heart, is recorded upon the face of
thy soul, and cannot be hid."
Then said the woman : " Why tellest thou
me these things? Are my sins greater than
the sins of others, that thou speakest thus ?
Are there not murderers and adulterers,
thieves and Sabbath-breakers enough, that
thou comest to me, who am none of these ?
217
A Lost Soul
My sins, which are not many, I have long
since repented, and lo ! thou revilest me, as
if I were the chief of sinners !
Then said the Spirit: "If thou hast truly
repented of thy sins, then is it well with
thee indeed!
" But for every sin which thou hast re-
membered and of which thou hast repented,
there are myriads which thou hast forgotten.
Dost thou think that because the very
memory of them has passed from thy mind,
so that they have become to thee as though
they had never been, that for this reason
they are not ?
" I tell thee that in the day wherein thou
shalt look upon thine own soul, be it fair or
foul, and see it in all its nakedness the day
which men speak of as the c Day of Judg-
ment,' thou shalt see the least of these
unremembered, unrepented sins, writ large
upon the face of thy soul.
" But answer me, ere I go from thee : Is
there any one under thy roof or among
those whose lives thou art able, for good or
218
A Lost Soul
for evil, to influence, upon whose soul thou
dost seek to look ? "
And the woman made answer : " The
souls of all who are under my roof, I know,
and need not to see ; but one there is, my
neighbour, who is very fair, and concerning
whom I am curious. Show me, then, her
soul, that I may learn whether what men
say of her be true or untrue."
But the Spirit said : " God hath not re-
vealed unto thee a vision of souls that so
thou mayest gratify an idle curiosity, but
that thou mayest realise thy responsibilities
and profit thereby.
" And dost thou indeed think that thou
knowest the souls of all them that dwell
under thy roof, or that there is any one on
earth, who knoweth even his own soul, as it
is in the sight of God?
" The heart of man resembles a secret
chamber wherein stands like the block of
white unhewn marble, set in the studio of a
sculptor a veiled figure. Though the man
may not so much as lift the corner of the
219
A Lost Soul
veil, yet must he forever and in secret work
to fashion and to form the figure that lies
beneath.
"And the figure is the Soul of the man,
and the unveiling thereof is called death ;
and until the figure be unveiled, the man
scarce knoweth what manner of man he is.
" And I tell thee that so far from knowing
the souls of all them who dwell under thy
roof there are some, among thy nearest and
dearest, into the secret places of whose heart
thou hast never looked, and of whose real
self thou knowest scarce more than thou
knowest of the stranger in the street.
" Is there no speck in thine own heart, or
in thine own past, which thou wouldst wish
that the husband, whose soul thou countest
one with thine, should see with thy eyes,
rather than with his, and which thou wouldst
not hesitate to reveal in all its nakedness?
And dost thou think thou knowest him
better than he knoweth thee?
"The very child whom for many years
thou didst scarce venture to let out of thy
220
A Lost Soul
sight, that so thou mightest keep him from
knowledge of evil, whose innocent face
thou didst kiss this morning, hugging thyself
in thy heart that thou wast secure of his
confidence and love dost thou know that
that child has already a life apart from thee
that he lives in a world which is created
for him, less by thy teaching than by the
talk of his companions and that so far
from scarcely realising, as thou dreamest, the
existence of evil, it may be that he is
already old in the knowledge of sin ? "
The Spirit ceased, and through the silver
mist that veiled the Abode of Souls, the
woman saw many forms pass to and fro.
Some were fair to look upon, and some
were foul. Others were neither fair nor
foul ; and some few she saw which she
recognised readily, inasmuch as they differed
but little from the selves which she knew.
Then said the Spirit : " Hast thou aught
to ask about any of these ? "
Pointing with her finger, the woman made
221
A Lost Soul
answer : " One form I see which troubles
me, and which I seem to know, and yet
know not. Tell me, then, whose soul it is."
" Thy father's," answered the Spirit.
But the woman laughed, saying : " My
father's face is wrinkled, and his form feeble
and bent, but yonder figure is straight and
lusty as a sapling, and the face thereof hath
the bloom and the beauty of youth."
"The face of thy father is wrinkled,"
answered the Spirit, "and his form feeble
and old, but years have not hardened his
heart, nor aged his soul, and therefore dost
thou see him young and fair in the Abode
of Souls."
As the woman turned again to look into
the Abode of Souls, there arose before her
the form of a beautiful girl, who gazed upon
her with eyes full of pity and love.
"Behold! the soul of thy sister," said the
Spirit.
But the woman made answer: "The face
of my sister is as ill-favoured as mine is fair,
and yonder girl is more beautiful than I."
222
A Lost Soul
Then said the Spirit : " Dost thou think
because God hath chosen to make thee fair
of face, and thy sister ill-favoured, that thou
shalt be fair and she ill-favoured to all
eternity ? "
As the woman, much wondering, turned
from him to gaze again upon the Abode of
Souls, another face rose up before her, upon
which she could not but look.
It was the face of one who had once been
fair ; but as the woman looked upon it, she
saw something written thereon, which re-
pelled her more than did the faces she had
seen that were low and animal. No sensual
vice had loosened the lip, bleared the eye,
or bloated the complexion ; but meanness
had set its mark upon the mouth and
pinched the nostrils ; and sordid, respectable
self-seeking and self-righteousness had made
hard the heart, and deadened the spiritual
nature more surely than vice or sin ; so that
the woman felt, as she looked, that she was
gazing upon the face of one who was lower
in the scale of being and farther from the
223
A Lost Soul
Kingdom of God, than are the wretched
creatures whom this world calls " fallen " or
"lost."
Then turning to the Spirit, she said :
" Who art thou ? and what is yonder evil
shape ? "
And the Spirit replied : " I am the Angel
of Death and Judgment, and the thing
which thou beholdest is thyself, and the soul
which thou hast made."
But, laughing scornfully, the woman made
answer : " By this I know that thou art a
lying Spirit, whom I need neither fear nor
heed : for behold ! I have but dreamed a
dream ! "
And the Spirit replied: "Thou hast indeed
dreamed a dream, but the name of that
Dream was Life, and now thou dr earnest no
longer"
224
JDNELY'GOD
A MAN lay on his bed at midnight, and
dreamt that he stood alone by the
sea, and that his hour of death was
nigh.
From the gates of night and across the sea
there blew a wind that made him shiver less
with physical cold than with a sense of soul
desolation and loneliness ; a wind which chilled
the heart of him even more than the body.
And as he looked up to sky and stars
his lonely spirit, losing itself in the infinite
abyss, turned sick and giddy at the thought
of dying, and reeled shuddering to earth
again.
Then the man thought of the woman he
227
The Lonely God
loved, the wife of his heart and mother of
his children, and that if he and she might
but die together if he might but set out
with her hand in his, he should no longer
fear to make death's journey ; and, even as
he so thought, he awoke with pounding heart
and panting breath ; awoke to shudder at the
darkness and the loneliness, and with a
nameless fear lying at the centre of life, like
the lurking shadow of an unknown, unseen
foe.
As he lay he heard the low breathing of
his sleeping wife, and with a sigh of relief,
and with all sense of lonesomeness gone, the
man closed his eyes and fell asleep.
Again he dreamed a dream in which he
thought that he stood in the presence of
God.
Whether he had been borne to the infinite
regions which stretch on and away, and yet
away, and yet again away, beyond the limits
of our universe ; or whether he were still on
the earth ; or had soared to a distant star,
or to the vast and void sky spaces that lie
228
The Lonely God
between the worlds ; or had crept into the
narrow chamber ot the human soul, the man
knew not, but he was aware in some won-
derful way of all that was taking place on
all God's myriad worlds.
He saw circling planets sweep faster and
faster on their ever-narrowing orbit, until at
last they fell and flew, like moths to a
candle, to feed the flaming furnace of the
sun ; and he looked upon his own home,
and saw the billowy rise and fall of his
wife's bosom, and heard the cry of the child
who lay in a cot by her side.
He gazed upon burnt-out worlds, moons
that had once been astir with life, and heard
their cooling and cinderous surfaces crack
into chasm and cave ; and he looked into
the bowels of the earth, and saw strange
creatures breeding and sporting amid the
central fires.
He watched comets, those vagabonds of
the heavens, wandering gipsy-like between
the worlds, or weaving out-lying system to
out-lying system, like nebulous shuttlecocks
229
The Lonely God
of the skies ; and he saw into the secret
workings of human souls.
He looked upon the planet Jupiter, that
laboratory of God, and beheld moving
athwart the thin atmosphere, strange shapes,
uncanny as a half-formed, prematurely-born
babe, that seemed neither spirit nor flesh,
but which he knew were the soul-embryos
of creatures which, developing by progressive
stages and from age to age, should, in the
aeons to be, become beings infinitely greater
than man, and scarcely less glorious than
God ; and he peered beneath the earth's
surface, and watched the anxious running to
and fro of innumerable ants.
Then raising his head the man looked into
the eyes of God, and saw eternity lying
therein.
And at that sight the man fell back with
a cry like that of one smitten by the light-
ning, and with the very soul of him sick
and swooning with fear.
But in a voice of infinite tenderness, God
spake, bidding him be of good cheer.
230
The Lonely God
And God said: "Art thou he who feared
death because of its loneliness ? "
And the man said : " I am he."
And to him the Almighty spake again :
" Thou diest alone, but I live alone ; and as
is the sound which thou hearest in the hollow
convolutions of a shell, to the roar of the
central sea, so is thy loneliness to Mine.
When God throws His arms around a soul
and draws that soul away from its com-
panions, and to Himself, then is that soul
very lonely, but the loneliness is but the being
gathered to the heart of God"
Then said the man : " By Thee all that is
in heaven above or in the earth beneath was
created. Thou hast but to speak the word,
and lo ! a legion of angels are at Thy
side to bear Thee company by night or by
day." '
But God made answer : " That which I
create, be it angel or archangel, is but My
creature, and can never be My companion."
And again the man : " Thou art God the
Eternal One, Ruler of Earth and Sea. Is
231
The Lonely God
it nothing to Thee that all men worship
Thee and hold Thee in reverence ? "
But to him the Almighty made answer :
"The thought of God is, to most men, but
a plank to which they hope to cling when
the waters of death are closing over their
heads. How many are there, thinkest thou,
who love the God they have never seen, as
thou lovest thy wife and child ? "
And the man said : " Thou hast but to say
the word, and behold all men must love
Thee."
But God answered him : " For the love
which I compel, I care not."
Then said the man : " Thou art God, the
Omnipotent One. Sun, moon, and stars
sprang into being at Thy bidding. Thou
hadst but to say, ' Let there be light,' and
there was light ; and Thou didst but
breathe upon inanimate clay, and lo ! it
became an immortal soul, clothed in a form
divinely fair, and fashioned in Thine own
likeness ; and man, the heir of eternity and
image of God, came into being. To Thee
232
The Lonely God
all things are possible. Thou hast but to
say, * Let be ! ' to set at Thy side another
God, like even unto Thyself, that so Thou
mayst be alone no more."
And yet again God said : " That which I
create is but My creature, and can never be
My companion ; and from My loneliness,
even Mine own omnipotence is powerless to
deliver Me.
"Rememberest thou not of Him who was
slain on Calvary, that men taunted Him,
saying, * He saved others : Himself He cannot
save ' ?
" Even so from the loneliness wherefrom
God saveth others, Himself God cannot save.
"The cry in loneliness that rang from Cal-
vary's Cross rings throughout creation still.
Thou lookest out into the night, and thou
shudderest not because of the blackness
that broods between earth and sky, but
because thou hast looked, as into an abyss,
into the lonely soul of God. Nature is lonely
because of God's loneliness. On every breeze
is borne were the ear of man attuned to
233
The Lonely God
hear it the sound of innumerable lamenta-
tions, which is Nature's echo of God's lonely
cry.
" God shudders and, over the shining sur-
face of the sea, a sudden tremor flits.
" God hides His countenance and the
sunshine fades from meadow and field, and
darkness covers the face of the sky.
" But on the shadowless, shining peaks of
Eternity, God sits lonely forever; and into
His loneliness neither man nor Nature can
enter. Nay, of such loneliness as God's, the
soul of man cannot even conceive, for man's
death is not more lonely than God's life.
" I am the Loneliness."
The voice ceased, and the man awoke to
know that he had been dreaming.
Outside the wind made moan continually,
and from the tossing tree tops there came a
sound like the ceaseless sighing of the sea.
For one moment the man gazed into the
black and brooding night, whence it seemed
to him that eyes of infinite sadness looked
out of the darkness into his own.
234
The Lonely God
In the next, he had drawn the curtain and
turned from the window, that in the warmth
and light of the room, and in the caresses of
his waiting wife, he might cease even to
remember that he had dreamed a dream.
Yet sometimes, as he stands and listens
to the sea at midnight, there seems borne
to him on every breeze a sound like that of
innumerable lamentations, and then the man
thinks again of his dream, and fancies that
in sobbing surge and wailing wind he hears
the cry of the lonely God.
235
OUTACHILD
PROEM
THE night of New Year's Eve had come,
and I stood under the stars in a garden
brimmed with white moonlight and set
around with trees. In the garden all was
still, and the sky was clear overhead, but, low
down on the horizon, Night was plying her
spindle, weaving floating and fleecy cloud-
flax into the dark fabric of cloud-curtains,
to be drawn ere long around the sleeping
place of the moon. As a veil of fine lawn
might cover a girl's face, so suddenly a wisp of
white cloud-rack drifted across the moon. I
say " across the moon," but so undimmed
was her splendour that one might have
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supposed the veil had been draped about her
face, instead of drawn across it.
As metal is cut by a die, as flesh is cut
by a knife, so the moving mist seemed to be
cut through as it met the moon's edge.
And so sharp was the severance, that when
the cloud-rack which aureoled the moon was
suddenly stained luminous cinnamon as a
cloth is stained amber or topaz by spilt
wine, as the clothing of a duellist is stained
crimson by a wound it seemed to me as
if the white cloud-rack were stained with
the ebbing of its own blood.
Suddenly, faint and far, wind-borne upon
the breeze, came the first chime of a church
bell striking the hour. The old year was
irrevocably gone a year of sin and shame
and cowardice, of mean aims, mean acts,
mean defeats, and meaner triumphs.
Looking back upon the track I had
trodden, it seemed to me like some slimy
serpent-trail upon the face of God's fair
world. I could not bear to think of it ;
and as an archer wings a shaft into the
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blue, so I strove to wing my thoughts,
arrow-wise, into the as yet unstained future.
I looked upon that future as a traveller
standing upon a hill looks at dawn upon
a far stretch of unknown country.
As to morrow, and the days of the week
which lie before us, differ not greatly from
yesterday and the days of the week that
have just gone, so, to the traveller, the
face of the landscape before him fields
and lanes and highways, with here and
there a common, and here and there a
church is not unlike the face of the land-
scape through which he has just passed.
In the immediate future there is no
menace of that Unknown which is always
the dreaded.
But beyond this near stretch of country
the traveller realises that hidden in mists
he cannot pierce lies a strange and unknown
land.
And looking into the year that lay before
me, I fancied that glittering above the
smoking plain I caught a glimpse of the
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towers and pinnacles of a great city. The
next moment, towers and pinnacles were
gone, and I saw only a desolate land of
dark, the shadows of bare rock and brooding
mountain, and, beyond the mist, the utter
loneliness of the sea.
4 'The coming year! O God!" I cried,
"what holds it for me of good or evil?
Shall my feet indeed tread the streets of
some city of light which I have seen
miraged only in my dreams ? or shall they
lead me to the sullen shore of Death's in-
exorable sea?"
But on the night there came no answer
save the answer of my own soul :
"To all men, even to the impure, God
gives the gift of memory. But the memory
of the impure is like an opaque-backed mirror
hung on a wall. It shows only what lies
behind. But sometimes, to those who are
crystal-pure of heart, God gives, in place of
memory's mirror, a magic glass, as crystal-pure
even as their hearts a glass in which may be
seen, not only the mirrored picture of what lies
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behind, but also of what lies before. These
are they whom men call poets and prophets,
and of all men they most resemble God, inas-
much as in a measure they share the power to
foresee what is to come, as well as to remember
what is past. These are the pure in heart,
and thou art not as they. Therefore, to look
into the future is denied thee. Look back
upon thy past thou mayest, for the past lies
hidden in thine own thoughts. But the future
lies hidden in the thoughts of God, and, into
the thoughts of God, the impure of heart
may never see.
243
PART I
I
THAT night as I slept I had a dream of the
future. I seemed to be looking upon London
as it will be a hundred years hence. Changes
had come about of necessity changes in
methods of locomotion, changes in costume,
changes in many public buildings and public
streets. Except, however, for the fact that
parks and pleasure grounds had multiplied on
every side, the London on which I looked was
not greatly different from the London of to-
day. One change, however, attracted my
attention many churches and chapels had
entirely disappeared, and most of those which
remained seemed to have lost their sacred
character. At one time these churches had
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A World Without a Child
been among the most distinctive buildings in
, every quarter, but now, wherever one looked,
huge palaces of entertainment or refreshment
sought if only by their very bulk to shoulder
all other buildings out of sight. Colossal of
scale, superbly proportioned, these palaces
of delight dominated the place in which they
stood, as a pyramid dominates its immediate
surroundings in the desert. Upon them had
been lavished all the imaginings of the architect,
all the magnificence of design and decoration
which art could conceive and money buy.
Nor did these splendours go unappreciated.
Sunday though I knew the day to be, the
theatres and music halls were open and filled
to overcrowding. In the cafes, restaurants
and drinking places, gaily-dressed throngs
lounged, smoking, or sipping the nectar of
rare wines and liqueurs. Bands played in
the public squares ; and, in the parks and
open spaces, games of skill and strength were
watched by eager crowds.
I remember, however, that what I most
missed in this new world, thus given up to
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pleasure and delight, was the laughter of little
children. Children there were, but only a few,
and their faces seemed to have lost something
of the freshness of childhood. It often happens
that when youth and maiden, man and woman,
love God, and love each other so purely that
they take no thought of aught but of God and
of their love God takes thought for their
children, that they be straight and strong and
very beautiful. But when the man and the
woman make not love their world, but the
world their love ; either delaying marriage
till youth be gone, lest by living simply they
lose something of ease and comfort, or, if they
marry, hoping that their union be childless,
lest the dear and lovely burden of babyhood
(a burden which no true woman would willingly
forego) lie upon a bosom which, but for that
burden, had been bared, not to the sweet
pressure of baby lips and fingers, but to the
eyes of partners in a dance, of fellow-guests at
a dinner, or of utter strangers in a theatre ;
when those, who love, thus take thought to
evade love's sacred obligation, take thought of
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money and position and worldly pleasure, it
often happens that upon the faces of their
children, if children come, is to be seen some-
thing of the ageing anxiousness which had
filled the thoughts of their parents.
The faces of the children, upon whom I was
now looking, seemed to me strangely worn
and wizened. They were like the faces of the
children of the old.
Wondering at all this, I walked slowly on,
and, before long, found myself approaching
St. Paul's. When last I had seen the great
Cathedral, hemmed in as it was among mean
surroundings of mart and shop and warehouse,
I had likened it in my mind to some magnifi-
cent tropical plant, the seed of which had
chanced to drop among rank and closely grow-
ing weeds, and so, in the struggle for existence,
had been compelled to tower above its fellows,
that thereby it might thrust upward, to the
light and to the sun, the purple closed-flower
of its dome.
Now I was rejoiced to see it surrounded by
spacious grounds, for these baser growths had
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been swept away ; and bole and branch and
blossom stood open to the sky. As I drew
near I heard, coming from within, the sound
of cheers and laughter and stamping feet ; and
a venerable old man, still hale of body and with
the light of undimmed intellect flashing in his
eyes, was coming from the portal, his face
ablaze with wrath, as he shook off, as it were,
the very dust of the place from his shoes.
To him I addressed myself :
" Sir, what means this unseemly disturbance
in the House of God? I am but newly arrived
in this country, and in this city, after an absence
of many, many years ; and the sights I see,
the sounds I hear, but most of all this sacri-
legious uproar coming from the nation's house
of prayer, make me ask myself what change
has come to Christian England that such things
can be on the day of rest."
" Your absence must indeed have been long
and your wanderings far and many," he made
answer with sad courtesy, " if you know not of
the changes that have come about in England
and in Europe this many a year. If your
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object be but to mock an old man's grief at the
godlessness that has spread like a canker in
this city and in this nation, I pray you to stand
aside and let me pass."
" Sir," I said, " believe me that I am one
who has so long been dead to the world which
once I knew, that all I see around me is strange
and unfamiliar. That which I ask you, I ask
in all sincerity. What means, then, this un-
seemly disturbance in God's house and on
God's day ? "
" Did God dwell in houses builded of men,
He might often go homeless in England to-day,"
was the answer. " Know ye not that save for
a faithful few, the setting apart of one day in
the week for the worship of God has long
ceased in this country, even as what were once
Houses of Prayer have now been converted to
the people's use as Places of Entertainment or
Palaces of Delight ? "
"Has this country no national religion then?"
I asked.
"None," was the reply. "England of to-day
is divided into two great parties the Pleasurists
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A World
and the Pessimists. The former preach the
familiar doctrine, ' Eat, drink, and be merry,
for to-morrow we die.' They acknowledge no
responsibility to any Supreme Being, nor to
posterity, declaring that each is here to find in
life what pleasure he can. The Pessimists, on
the other hand, preach, as of old, that this is the
worst of all possible worlds. They denounce
it as a crime to bring a child into a world where
all must of necessity surfer pain of body and
fear of mind, until called on to undergo the
final mind-agony and body-pangs of death.
Suicide they hold to be no sin, since the sooner
the human race comes to an end, the better for
all concerned. Whether one be a Pleasurist
or Pessimist is very much a question of tem-
perament or of health, and matters very little
in the end, since each is equally Godless
in life."
" Is this then the reason why I see so few
children, and that the few I see, look as if they
no longer knew all men and women even the
veriest stranger to be the little ones' lover
and friend?"
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And sadly the old man made answer :
" Very lovely is the confidence of childhood.
We do well to speak of ( King Baby,' for the
right, by which a little child shall rule, is a
diviner, sweeter right and sanctity than ever
was accorded to kings. It is the unalienable
right, the royal prerogative, of every child to
come into this world assured that its coming
will set joybells of the heart a-ringing.
"Ere that child came to earth, God stooped
to take into His arms the tiny image of Him-
self, to breathe between the little lips the breath
of His own life, to set upon the baby brow the
kiss of which dreaming children think when
suddenly they smile in their sleep. Then with
infinite tenderness He laid the little flower-like
form in the hands of an angel, kneeling to
receive the precious burden :
" 'Out of God's hands, and the hands of God's
angels in heaven, thou shalt pass into the care
of God's angels on earth. Thou shalt enter
the world, speeded of God, and tended by the
hands of God's dear women, even as when
thou leavest it, God's dear women shall tend
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A World Without a Child
thee to the last, and God and His Son, thy
Saviour, shall wait to welcome thy return.
" 'Go forth little one, and may thy coming
make glad the hearts of women and men, for I
have sent thee, I am with thee. Go !' ''
252
II
THE old man's voice broke, and with pity that
was wrathful, and wrath that was pitiful, he
cried :
" And now the little children, whom God has
sent, are no longer welcome in a world given
up to selfish seeking after pleasure and after
vanity.
" I say not that the world has grown worse
in all respects. Many evils, which I remember,
disfigure the face of civilisation no more. Crime
is in many, if not most, cases, the result of
upbringing and surroundings. Society saw
this, and, seeing, too, that crime was a menace
to herself society, for her own protection, so
ordered things that the incentives to crime are
gone. Therein is the world the better, and
therein am I grateful and glad. But my glad-
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ness and my gratitude cannot make me forget
the fact that the world has grown Christless
and Godless.
"It is nigh a hundred years ago since the
change began. Till then, Religion though
the world was slowly becoming secularised, and
faith in Revealed Religion was on the wane
was still a power in the land. But, inch by
inch, Secularism gained ground. At first only
in the great cities, then like some huge octopus,
she stretched forth her tentacles to the towns,
making wherever she established herself, new
centres, from which stealthily to protrude fin-
gers that, as they neared a victim, shot out
suddenly into interminably extended arms ; till
at last she laid hold on the villages, and, finally,
sprawled herself obscenely over the land, suck-
ing, leech-like, at the life-blood of the nation,
crushing religion, cobra-wise, in her folds, and
suffocating faith by her voided slime.
" All this took long to accomplish ; and
possibly Secularism had not throttled Religion
in England thus easily, had not other causes
contributed to the same end. During the first
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Without a Child
quarter of the twentieth century, there came
to this country a season of unprecedented
prosperity. Trade throve as trade had never
thriven before. Money accumulated on all
hands, and at such a rate that some of those
whose tempers had once been soured and their
faces sharpened by the constant and irking
need of money, at last became newly sharpened
of feature and temper, because they could not
fast enough devise new pleasures upon which to
squander their wealth.
" At first the sudden influx of money into
the land, with the consequent cessation of the
necessity to work, brought no ill-effects in its
train. The mass of the people abandoned
themselves, it is true, to the pursuit of pleasure,
but the pleasure-seeking took a healthy turn.
Field-sports and games of every sort were
ardently followed. Those who had formerly
spent their days working at a desk, serving in
a shop, or toiling in a factory or warehouse,
were now for the first time, and for a great
portion of the day, in the fresh air, with
benefit both to body and to brain. Our
2 55
A World
national physique improved, and with it our
morals.
" But in course of time the reaction came.
Not all at once, for, to this day, those who
occupy themselves in games and sports may be
reckoned by millions. Once, however, let the
necessity to work be removed, and it is sur-
prising how swiftly the individual or the nation
lapses into idleness, how inevitably idleness
becomes self-indulgence, and how easily con-
sistent self-indulgence passes by slow stages
first into luxuriousness, next into licence, and
finally into vice.
" The people grew more lazy, more luxurious,
more disinclined to bestir themselves every day.
Instead of themselves taking part, as of old, in
the sports they loved, they now allowed them-
selves the luxury of paying other and poorer
folk to play these sports for them, while
they, inactive themselves, lounged smoking and
drinking, to look on. And so insensibly the
manhood of the race softened. While the
people of England could afford to buy wheat
from other lands, what need for them to till or
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to toil in their own fields ? While they could
travel long distances in cars provided with
every luxury, why trouble themselves to ride or
to walk ? While they could pay Chinamen to
work their mines, Lascars to man their ships,
Negroes, Indians, and Arabs to fight their
battles, and other mercenaries to fetch, carry,
cook, scrub, bake, why task themselves un-
necessarily? Their very children, the women
at last ceased to suckle, laying the lips of their
little ones to strange breasts, and leaving them
when older to Ayahs to tend and to women of
other lands to teach.
" Then against child-bearing itself the women
of England began to rebel. ' Too long have
we borne this heavy and unequal affliction,'
they cried. 'Why should God penalise us
thus from our birth laying the burden and the
suffering upon the weaker sex, instead of upon
the sex which is strong ? Scarcely are we out
of our own childhood before this life-long
humiliation is laid upon us, to rack us with
ache in brain and limb and body; to wound,
with crueller ache, our sensitive and shrinking
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A World
spirit, and to terrify us with the threat of
possible anguish to come. The Psalmist, being
a man, could write merrily of the bridegroom
coming " rejoicing out o his chamber." It was
like a man to forget that every woman who of
her great love, gives herself to wife, knows well
that it may be her own death-sentence which
she hears, when they two are declared to be
man and wife. If she bear a child to her
husband, and bear in safety, she is but as one
who has been reprieved ; and has no assurance
that a time may not come thereafter when the
dread sentence will be carried out.
" ' From birth to burial, the days of a woman
are but cycles and seasons of sickness of body
and sadness of mind, of travail and torture that
must be faced with the consciousness that she
may never live to look upon the features of the
child for whose sake her travail and her torture
are borne.
11 * Let us make an end of this cruelty, of this
life-long iniquity. Wives we will be, if so it
pleases us, but mothers we will be no more.
We, no less than men, have our individual lives
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to live, we have other vocations to follow than
the bearing of children at the will of a man or
at the bidding of a God. Of the two who are
responsible for the coming of a child, one, and
that one the strong and sturdily framed, goes
free, while the pain and the torture in their
entirety are appointed to be the lo* of women,
soft of flesh, delicate of frame, and exquisitely
sensitive to anguish of body and fear of mind.
" ' If God, as men assert, be responsible for
all this, and for more than this, for if it happen
that the child be born out of wedlock, once
again it is the woman who pays, once again the
man goes free, while upon the woman who,
haply, is more sinned against than sinning, the
direst and most cruel consequences fall, if
God, as men assert, be answerable for all this,
is it not time that we women dethroned in our
hearts the unjust Judge and dishonest Appor-
tioner of life's good and evil, either refusing to
believe in a God at all, or else setting up in
His stead another God of our own to worship ?
If the Christ approve this cowardly, cruel and
iniquitous scheme, then say we to the Christ :
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A World Without a Child
" ' By this we know that Thou wast but a
man, with all a man's injustice to women ; and
though Thou dost claim to have shared, with
Thy fellow men, all that a man may endure of
human suffering, yet have we women no part
in Thee, for though Thou hast shared all else,
at least Thou hast never shared the heaviness
and the anguish of a woman's lot. We owe no
allegiance to a Divinity be he God or be he
Christ who has doomed unresisting, defence-
less women to such a lot. The right of such
an one to sit in judgment upon us, thus to
sentence us and to cast us, untried and unheard,
into such dungeons of despair, we henceforth
and for ever repudiate and deny.'"
260
Ill
THE old man paused, white and trembling.
" Blasphemy such as this one shrinks even
from repeating, but so it was that many women
spoke a century's half ago, and so it is that
many more speak to-day. That the mystery
of human suffering, and, most of all, the
mystery of woman's suffering, gives cause and
gives colour to their bitterness and even to
their blasphemy, I who seek the truth may not
deny.
4< But creed is more often the outcome of con-
duct than conduct is of creed. To decide to
disobey God, to persist in that disobedience,
means that you have decided to do without
God in your life. And when you have decided
to put God out of your life, you are already an
atheist by choice, and must not complain if you
end in becoming one by conviction.
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A World
"So it was with these women of whom I
have spoken. Their denial of God was the
result, the inevitable result, of a godless life.
"Even when I was a lad, in the second
quarter of the twentieth century, I remember
hearing my father say that the growing godless-
ness of women was the most appalling sign of
the times. The women, even more than the
men, had become selfish, sensual, and worldly.
I mean not that all women were so, for the
godly women far outnumbered the ungodly, if,
alas ! the ungodly outnumber the godly to-day.
But no fact was so significant, no fact seemed
more to menace the end of all things earthly,
than the terrible change for the worse which
had come over women. Among women of all
classes, the drink-habit and the drug-habit were
enormously on the increase. In 'society/ so
called, the home life was almost entirely a thing
of the past, and the majority of marriages
were childless. The women occupied them-
selves chiefly in card-playing, gambling on race-
courses, speculating on the Stock Exchange,
and in wantonness which was all the worse
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not because it led, but because it did not
lead, to the Divorce Court. Violation of the
marriage vow was so common as scarcely to
cause surprise ; and men, perhaps because of
their evil living, had become too shamelessly
craven and complacent to trouble themselves to
make an exception by sueing for a divorce.
" Among the women of the middle classes,
the semblance of morality and respectability
remained, but child-bearing had for the most
part ceased. As of old, the man desired a
wife, as of old, the woman desired a husband,
but whereas of old, a marriage was counted
to be crowned and made newly holy, newly
honourable, and newly happy by the birth of
a child that marriage had come to be counted
most fortunate where child there was none.
" And so too, among the women who stood
lowest in the social scale. They also refused
to bear children to their husbands; and if actual
immorality was less common than among the
women who constituted ' society ' coarseness,
even shamelessness of speech and action were
only too frequent. Many of them were to be
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A World
seen with lover or with husband, sitting long
evenings through in the public-house, bandying
unclean jests, and setting vile slanders afoot
about their neighbours.
"When such changes can come about in
woman and, alas ! we have gone from bad to
worse during the last fifty years one is tempted
to think that the end of the world must be nigh.
At one time the history of religion seemed to
be written in the hearts of good women. They
were the mainstay of morality, pity, purity, and
of the spirit of utter selflessness, which is to be
seen in all its immeasurable majesty in the
Christ. Their very sufferings made them
nearer to Him, liker to Him, than man can
ever be. Every woman, most of all every
mother, is, by her very nature, a Christian.
Now one meets everywhere old women, young
women, wives and maidens, comely of face and
figure, soft- voiced, friendly-seeming the ghost,
the shadow, the mere semblance of what woman
once was, yet seemingly happy and satisfied
and in no way suspecting that the soul of their
womanhood is gone who tell you smilingly
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that Christ was a man, that God is not, that
Heaven or Hereafter there is none. I am an
old, old man, but to me, even to-day, the horror
of it is haunting.
" The words ' atheist ' and * woman ' seem to
be the very antithesis of each other. That a
woman might fall, might sin, was, I knew,
possible ; but that, so long as she drew the
breath of life, so long as she retained her
woman's nature, she could deny or defy God,
seemed to me unimaginable. Such a creature
is a monster, a contradiction of the name of
woman, the very apostate of her sex.
" The immorality of her renunciation of
motherhood (an immorality which is, I believe,
a greater offence against God, against humanity,
against nature, and against the nation, than
that she should be a mother and no wife)
threatens, it is true, the very existence of our
race; but remembering what women are to-day,
I could go on my knees to thank God that at
least such women bear no children."
Again the old man's voice broke, and he
uplifted eyes and hands in prayer :
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A World
11 God of Hosts, Lord of Childhood, look
down on this people, that corruptly disobey
Thy primal precept and command. Thou seest
that we are drunken of pleasure, eaten up of
luxury, rotten of ease, as were the people
of Sodom and Gomorrah and of Ancient
Rome.
"Let there not fall upon us that most terrible
of all Thy vengeances which Thou didst visit
upon Ephraim of old, when Thou didst say,
' Ephraim is joined to idols : let him alone ! '
Let us not alone, great God, we pray Thee.
Cleanse us of our corruption, purge us of our
sin, even though Thou slayest, for it is better
that God scorch with fire, or smite with thunder-
bolts, than that the sinful be left to his sin, and
be let alone of God. For the sake of Thy
Son, the Lord Christ, hear us and save us.
Amen."
In my dream, it seemed to me that God
made answer saying :
" The prayers of the righteous avail ; and
because even now there are many among this
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nation who follow after My commandments,
I will visit upon this people that which shall
turn them from their sin. It has of old time
been decreed that, of this world, an end should,
in God's good time, be made ; but whereas
man has believed that the world's end should
come suddenly and in a moment by fire, or
slowly, by the dying out of life on the face of
the earth by cold, I, WHO AM, decree that
in another way that end shall be.
" Behold now I make barren the womb of
the world.
" Spring-time shall come again, but with it
shall come no new flower, no new bud on bush
or on tree.
" Spring-time shall come again, but with it
shall come no new bird, no new beast, no new
creature of any kind.
" Spring-time shall come again, but with it
shall come no new child.
" Henceforth creation and procreation shall
cease. God has said it, and what God has said
shall be."
267
PART II
I
IN my dream I looked upon the world, and, as
a peach hangs by the wall, so the world seemed
to me to hang against the wall of the heavens,
like over-ripe fruit, ready to drop off and fall
away from the world-tree which stands in God's
great garden of the skies. The clock of the
world was running down, and God's hand would
wind it never again. The generation upon
which I looked was to be the world's last, for
the life of the world had become a fire that has
no power to kindle new flame, and so must
burn itself out into eternal dark.
The world was dying, but as yet the world
knew it not, for many there were who discoursed
learnedly of sun-spots and star changes, of
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A World Without a Child
diverted warm streams from the south, and
floating iceberg islands and continents from
the north, which, by chilling the world's atmo-
sphere, had confused the seasons and so affected
life on the globe.
But at last there came a time when, watching
the more thoughtful and more observant, I saw
upon their faces some puckering as of undefined
perplexity. Just as at the approach of a
thunder-storm there falls upon nature even
before thunder clouds appear a sudden hush, a
rumour as of coming disaster, which drives the
cattle of the field, the creatures of the air to
shelter so over city and country there lay a
sense of impending calamity. Men and women
seemed dimly to realise that a change was
taking place, of the exact nature of which they
were not as yet aware. They would stop in
their walking or in their talking to peer queerly
about them, like those to whom familiar sur-
roundings seem suddenly to have grown
unfamiliar, but who fear to speak what is in
their thoughts lest they be ridiculed of their
fellows. Yet each day the faces, upon which
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uneasiness was written, multiplied ; and I saw
that both men and women began to look fur-
tively, fearsomely, strangely, at each other.
And with reason, for now I saw that women
were fast losing their woman's loveliness ; men,
their manhood's splendour and strength.
In all the world there is no lovelight so
divine as the light which shines in the eyes of
a father, of a mother, at first sight of their
child. In all the world there is no sight more
sweet, more sacred, more solemn, than the
sight of the little child lying sheltered on the
bosom of the mother, who, in her turn,
seeks loving shelter and shepherding from the
strong man against whose protecting breast
she leans.
It is in Fatherhood, in Motherhood, that
men and women become likest God ; since in
a sense they are permitted to share with Him
the joy and the mystery, the majesty and awe
and wonder of creation. For this were they
born into the world, born as it were in the
purple. When man and woman, youth and
maiden, love each other purely and truly, then
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be their place high or be it humble, they become
princes and princesses by right of succession
and by right of royal birth, then to them comes
naturally the voice and the manner of courts ;
and when they marry, be their home cottage or
be it castle, they shall enter it as prince and
princess into a palace.
But they shall come to higher estate than
this. There be who maintain that love and
life are consummated by the coming together
in marriage of those who love ; but so to speak
is to misread the sacred mysteries. Is the
means to an end of more moment than the end
itself? Is it the scattering of the grain in
springtime or the reaping of the ripe corn at
harvest which crowns the husbandman's year ?
When a man becomes a father, a woman a
mother, then is he a king and a creator indeed,
then is she a queen, and crowned with the
rarest diadem that womanhood may wear. It
is that men and women may be drawn together
in love and marriage, thereby to carry on the
work of creation which God Himself has
begun ; that earth may not be lacking in the
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laughter of little children, nor heaven in the
lovely light upon the face of angels, who of
their purity may see God it is for this that
God makes women divinely fair, makes men
straight and strong and fearless.
But now from the faces and forms of the
women upon whom I looked something of
the fairness and sweetness of womanhood were
gone ; from the faces and figures of the men,
much of their manly beauty and strength.
They were like flowers upon whom the frost
has fallen and that wither blossomless and
seedless upon their stalks. They were kings
and queens of love no longer, but base-born
subjects and thralls of lust. And of their lust
came not love, nor affection, nor even liking,
but hatred and scorn. And of their hatred and
scorn came fear fear of each other, fear of foe,
and fear of friend.
For now at last they knew that they walked
a world whose days were numbered. What
had been but a rumour in the air, a whisper in
the ear, soon came to be murmured under the
breath in the market-place, then to be openly
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discussed in the streets, and at last to be shouted
from the housetops.
For spring-time had come again, but with it
had come no new flower, no new bud on bush
or tree. Spring-time had come again, but with
it had come no new bird, no new beast, nor
creature of any kind. Spring-time had come
again, but with it had come no new child.
Wherefore men and women looked into each
other's faces and were afraid, for they knew
now that the end of the world was nigh.
2 73
II
THEN madness seized them. They were like
shipwrecked sailors who, hopeless of rescue,
and knowing that ere long they must be sucked
under of the waters, seek to evade the horror
of the last awful moment by stupefying them-
selves with drink. But that the winter of the
world had come that last winter to which
shall succeed no spring, was now plain to all ;
and men cursed the fate by which their time
on earth had fallen at such a season. "Why
should we, of all earth's generations, be thus
singled out," they said, " to come into the
world, only to witness and to share in the
world's doom ? "
" To our fathers and our fathers' fathers,"
one cried, " life was a V-shaped vista of happi-
ness. A starting point there was, and this
starting point men called birth : but the arms
of the V opened out, broadening on either side,
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in a sweep so wide as to embrace the whole
visible world, and stretching unendingly on
into Eternity. Now the V of life's vista is
inverted. We men and women walk its ever-
narrowing sides ; and as we walk, the point
where the sides run together in eternal dark
the point where there is no outlet, and no turn-
ing back, is even now in sight. Where lurks
he god or devil who has thus lured us into
life's cul-de-sac ? Let him come forth that we
may have speech of him, sight of him, and
curse him for a monster ere we die."
Then, when the outbreak of blasphemy had
spent itself, there came a season of reaction.
As a condemned prisoner sits hunched or
huddled in his cell, body and limbs ice-cold
and motionless, as if carved in stone ; the brain
and the burning eyes of him all that is alive ;
as he sits, unseeing for all his stare, unthinking
for all his intentness, every mental faculty fixed
and focussed upon his approaching fate, so men
and women sat or stood or walked apart. In
the sullenness of despair the world was settling
itself down to die.
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Ill
WHEN again in my dream I looked upon the
world, I knew that the end was not far. Some
twenty years or more must have passed since
the world's doom was first pronounced. Those
who had then been children were now women
and men. Of those who had then been
women and men, some were middle-aged,
others were old and grey, and many were dead.
The faces of all were strangely changed, but
whereas the men seemed stern and worn and
haggard, the faces of the women seemed to
me to have regained all, and more than all of
woman's loveliness. Sad-faced they were, even
as she who was honoured above all women ;
but so beautiful, so divine, were they in their
sorrow that it was not difficult to understand
how it is that men and women can see in the
A World Without a Child
Virgin- Mother that supremest type of pure
and perfect and sorrowing womanhood some-
thing of such sacred beauty that they are
tempted to forget her humanity, and to yield
to her such homage as should be accorded only
to her Divine Son.
Most sad it was to see the younger women
gather around one who was stricken in years.
" Dear mother," one of them said, " we were
children ourselves when God called the green
grass and the flowers and the young creatures
of every sort, and the little children, back to
Himself, and so we remember not the world
as the world was then. Will you not tell us of
it, again?"
" Ah ! the world as it was then ! " sighed the
old woman. " I wonder whether any of us
realised how beautiful it was ? In those days
the wind, which now blows scentless and joyless
on our cheeks, would come on June mornings
to call in at my window :
" ' Lie-a-bed ! Lie-a-bed ! ' he would say.
' While you slept, I have been a hay-making
this many an hour, tossing the mown sweetness
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aloft, tumbling it, toying with it, diving into
warm, ungathered waves of it, as a swimmer
dives into the sea ; and then, like the swimmer,
coming laughingly to the surface to shake
myself free of the sweet foam and spray of the
fields, as he shakes himself free of the salt foam
and spray of the sea.' But now the wind comes
to us no more to whisper of the sweetness of
hayfields, for the solace of green grass nowhere
makes glad the eye. Dear God ! I had not
thought so to have missed the grass. I am
not sure that I do not miss it even more than
I miss the flowers. In them, much as I loved
them, I miss but the exquisite broidery on
Nature's mantle. But by the loss of the grass,
Nature seems to have been ravished of the
robe which covers her nakedness, and she
cowers, shamed, unbefriended, and shivering
before me ! "
" Tell us again of the flowers, dear mother,"
pleaded a listener.
" Ah ! the flowers ! " cried the old woman
brokenly, " the flowers ! The very heart within
me grows faint with the sickness of my longing
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The earliest snowdrops those nuns among the
flowers, crystal-chaste and celibate from birth
which it may be, we first see standing
'little Sisters of the Poor' beside some humble
door or in some cottage garden, wearing the
white robe of their order, and with downcast
eyes and drooped head, that they may not so
much as look on evil.
" Sometimes I think of them as dear children
who have crept too early from bed, and so
stand with little bare feet and inclined head,
listening for the step of old Nurse Nature, and
ready, should she chide, to scamper back and
hide beneath the coverlet of snow.
" When first I saw the snowdrops, I was as
sure there is a God in Whom purity and love
and loveliness abide, as if that God had Him-
self stooped down from heaven to give them to
me. And never did this soul of mine utter
itself forth in intenser, purer prayer than when
I first saw the miracle of the snowdrop's green
and silver bells among the snow.
" Yet scarcely had I assured myself that this
or that flower the snowdrop or the wood-
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anemone was indeed come, before it was gone
again, and I remember, that to me it was as
if I had let the angel-soul of some dear one
from heaven come hither and return with cold,
ungrateful welcome.
" The secret of the flowers, God never lets
us make our own."
"And now," said another voice softly,
" speak to us of childhood and little children."
" Childhood," answered the old woman,
" was, in those happy days, the magic fountain
at which we, who were old, drank to renew our
youth. Looking upon those sweet child-faces,
we grew young again, even as now, looking
only upon the faces of the aged, we grow old
before our time. Life was then an unending
chain of flowers, which God's own hand was,
day by day, drawing upward from earth to
heaven, and to Himself. Each of us was a
single flower, a single link, upon the chain ;
and though many of those we loved passed
upward and out of sight, we knew that they
had come to a fairer garden, whither the Father
of flowers and little children would one day call
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us, and whither, in God's good time, those we
loved and left behind would follow in their
turn. But now it is as if the flower chain lay
bruised and broken. God's hand draws us
heavenward no more, and we are become
worthless as weeds that die and wither unwept.
It is as if we had neither child on earth nor
Father in heaven.
" Around our dying bed neither son nor
daughter of ours shall gather in love's last
tender ministry. Our darkening eyes no dear
familiar touch shall close ; our failing hands
our children's hands may never hold in life's
last moments, nor cross upon our breast when
life has fled."
" A world without a child!" broke in another
woman. " A world without a child ! And
women in it ! One had thought that, finding
herself in such a world, every woman had slain
herself, or had not dared to be seen save
betwixt the twilight and the dawn.
"Into London's river many an erring woman
has leapt, rather than become a mother ere yet
she was a wife. From London's bridges many
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a poor creature, weary of a life of shame, has
cast herself, and wherein is our estate more
honourable than hers? A world without a
child ! Yet a world in which men and women,
for lust's sake, make counterfeit love ; for lust
and lucre's sake make believe to marry for
how can they be man and wife, whom God has
for all time put asunder !
" Sister woman, upon the very earth we
tread, the shadow of our shame has fallen.
This earth has become human as we are, a
woman as we are, sterile even as we, our
Mother no longer, since, because of our sin,
she is pregnant with new life no more. Happy
are ye who are young, for knowing not the
world as it was, you know not what you have
lost. A world without a child ! The silence
of it ! Dear God, that silence hammers at my
ears more loudly than the clanging of a
thousand anvils. If, ere I die, it be mine
no more to hear the fledgling birds telling
their tiny beads of song among the
branches ; the milky call of calves to cows,
standing udder-deep in the meadow, and the
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lazy bass of the deep reply ; the high
treble of lambs upon the hillside, now dying
down upon the wind to a trembling sigh, now
assailing the ear in a very storm of gusty and
quavering plaint ; if it be mine to hear all these
no more, yet give me, ere I die, O God ! at
least to hear the patter of little feet upon the
stairs ; the soft pounding of wee fists upon my
door ; the babble of a baby-mother's chats and
confidences and chidings among her dolls ; the
chiming of child-laughter rippling and inter-
mittent as of wind-swayed silver bells among
the flowers from garden and meadow and
lane ; the soft intaking of a baby's breath, what
time the flushed cheek lies warm against my
bosom ; the placid sigh when the little one
stirs in its sleep ; the wee, fretful wail, which
changes to low crooning and ceases contentedly
as the baby lips end their search, and settle
down to that sweet indrawing at thought of
which even now this milkless bosom tingles and
thrills God of mercy, Christ of consolation,
hadst Thou been woman, as we are, Thou hadst
taken pity on us and pardoned us ere this.
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s
" Lord, in our ears there sounds the wailing
of little souls unborn little souls shut out and
prisoned from the sunlight in some far place,
more drear and cruel than any imagined purga-
tory, in which the souls of men and women
who have lived and died must suffer for
their sins.
" And as those who have taken life, think
that they see ghost-forms beckoning to them
from afar, so are we haunted by souls unborn,
yet not unslain. We, who should have been
their mothers, have become as it were their
murderesses, since, because of our sins they
are denied the gift of life. And ever these
little ghosts haunt us. Little frightened faces
look out at us from the dark ; little eyes grown
weary of watching for the mother who never
comes, follow; us wistfully in the daylight.
Little forms, oh, so cold ! creep close to us at
night, crying out vainly for the warmth and
food and comfort which we may not give.
" Dear God, Father of the Saviour, take
back this curse from us. Add, if it be Thy
will, anguish to anguish, labour to labour. In-
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crease, if so it seem good to Thee, the travail
and the pain a thousand fold : but have pity on
us and pardon us, and of Thy mercy give us
a child!"
She ceased, and my dream dimmed, but ere
it passed I heard the sound of many women
sobbing in the night.
285
IV
WHEN next in my dream I looked upon the
world, it seemed to me that yet another ten
years had passed, that thirty years had gone
by since any new child, new bird, new beast,
new creature of any sort had come to bring
new life into the veins of an ageing world.
These ten years had worked a terrible change.
When travellers who have visited the ruins of
some dead city of the past, wish to convey
a sense of utter desolation, they tell us that,
in the streets and public places, grass was
growing.
There grew no grass in the deserted streets
of London, when in my dream I looked upon
the great city, for every manner of green thing
was dead. What had once been parks were
now deserts of dust or caked clay. Every sign
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A World Without a Child
of shrub and flower was gone. What had once
been avenues of trees were now rows of jagged
stumps which, when the branches had rotted
and fallen, none had been at the trouble to
remove. Unsightly, grisly objects, they still
stood on either side of the roadway, like
decayed stumps in the jaws of an unclean hag.
Offal and refuse had gathered in the corners of
the city, blown scraps of straw and paper littered
the streets. Nine-tenths at least of the build-
ings were tenantless, and bills declaring that
"this commodious residence" or that " double-
fronted shop " was " to be sold or to be let "
grinned mockingly through windows, some
broken and all grimed with dirt, as if in enjoy-
ment of the jest of offering houses in which to
dwell, shops wherein to vend merchandise, to a
world which was so soon to end.
In keeping with the silence and tomb-like
aspect of the city was the singular whiteness
which the houses and public buildings had now
assumed. As for some years all manufactures
had ceased, and shops and factories were con-
sequently closed, the pall of smoke which
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formerly lay over London was gone, and for
the first time I saw the great city glittering
in the smokeless morning air. The houses and
buildings which had once worn the city's soot-
coloured livery, had, in the absence of smoke,
been rain- washed from black to grey, and from
grey to white, and now stood bleaching in the
sun, like tombstones in a cemetery. Dust and
decay were upon everything. So deserted was
the place that when, here and there, a solitary
man, or perhaps a man and a woman, walked
in what had once been a noisy thoroughfare
the uncanny clattering and echoing of their
footsteps could be heard long after they had
passed.
Had it been a waking instead of a dream-
world on which I was looking, I should pro-
bably have asked myself whether it were
possible that, from such a cause, so great a
change could come whether, in thirty years, a
world, which had ceased to bring forth children,
would already be approaching extinction or
would let its cities thus come to ruin.
I have said, too, that in my dream I saw the
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"world" a-dying, for so at the time it seemed
to me. Yet when, as must now be recorded, I
learned in my dream that, in some parts of the
world, life was but at its morning, that nations
multiplied in numbers and waxed greater in
strength, I saw no cause for wonder. In a
dream, though all be inconsistent and contra-
dictory, we ask no question.
And though I have said that in my dream,
London seemed to me a deserted city of the
dead, yet when in my dream I entered the
cathedral of St. Paul, and saw a great congre-
gation gathered together, I was not conscious
of any sense of wonder or surprise.
Under the dome a space had been cleared,
in the middle of which a venerable man was
kneeling in prayer, surrounded on every side
by a vast congregation of men.
1 'Weighty are the words of the dying," he
said, " wherefore, Lord God, we ask Thee to
give ear. Already we are a dying race, our
very existence menaced among the nations.
For thirty years no child has been born to
us, whereas the yellow races so multiply and
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A World Without a Child
increase that even now they overrun the world.
Out of Africa, India, Australia have they driven
us, and now of all our empire, of which we once
boasted that upon it the sun never set, this our
England only is left, and even now they are at
our doors.
" They who were once our slaves threaten to
become our masters. They whom we despised
as heathen and uncivilised, now hold Christen-
dom and civilisation in thrall. They have
boasted, and called their gods to witness, that
of the women of England they will make
daughters of shame ; of the men of England,
bondsmen and slaves to work a taskmaster's
will. God of Christendom, wilt Thou suffer
this thing to come to pass? Take back the
curse which Thou hast laid upon us. Give
us but one sign that Thou hast heard and
pardoned, and we will go forth in Thy strength
to do battle with our enemies and to overcome ;
but hear us, and haste Thee, for even now the
heathen are at our gates ! '*
290
ONCE more I passed out into the sunshine, and
as inside the cathedral a great congregation of
men was gathered, so outside, gathered an
even greater congregation of women, to whom
a woman was then speaking.
" Dear sisters," she said, "let us not forget
that us women God hath supremely honoured,
since, of a woman, He who is the world's
Saviour was born. At God's altars, men may
minister, but ere those altars were builded, God
had made of our knees a thrice holier altar, at
which God's children first bowed themselves in
prayer. By man's voice God may speak to the
nations, but, to the lips of God, the ear of every
mother is laid. Wherefore is ours the greater
sin, in that we have refused to listen. Where-
fore is ours the greater shame, in that some of
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us have forgotten the seal of chastity which
God set upon us when He chose a woman for
the white casket which should bear to earth the
Heavenly Pearl of God's incarnate Son. Let
us therefore be constant in prayer before Him
by whom all women are dear and sacred, since
Him, in anguish and travail, a woman bore.
Him, ere yet He was born, a woman saluted
as the Saviour which was to come. Him,
thereafter, good women hailed Lord and
Master, faithful even when the chosen ol
His disciples forsook Him and fled first
at the sepulchre, as last beside Him at the
Cross.
" Dear sisters, small wonder is it that we
women bend the knee in worship and love to
Him who is not only our Saviour and our God,
but our Elder Brother, our Defender and our
Friend.
" And when had woman such a friend as He ?
To Him the very harlot might come, knowing
that, because of her womanhood, He held her
honoured and holy. To Him the precious
ointment, wherewith the Magdalen anointed
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Him for His burial, was less precious than her
tears. When to Him they brought the woman
taken in sin, for her had He no word of con-
demnation, save ' Go and sin no more ! ' whereas
at those who cried out that she be stoned, He
thundered that terrible indictment, ( He that is
without sin among you, let him first cast a
stone.' At those words they saw themselves
branded before God and man, for the unclean
things they were ; and shrank away, one by
one, from that avenging presence, and from the
challenging purity of those eyes.
" Small wonder, I say, that all that is holy
in humanity should compel us to kneel to such
a Master ; small wonder that all that is hateful
and hypocritical should cry out 'Away with
Him! Crucify Him! To the cross.'
" Sisters, He hears us still, though we be
sinful even as she whom He bade to go and
sin no more. Sisters, let us kneel to Him in
prayer that He may intercede for us to our
Father and His."
For a moment the woman ceased, as, still
standing, she raised piteous hands to heaven,
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and then while some knelt, some stood, some
flung themselves face downward to the ground,
her voice broke out again in prayer :
" Lord God of the Living and of the Dead,
hear and save. Thou wast the God of our
fathers, and of our fathers' fathers, of our
mothers, and of our mothers' mothers, even as
Thou wast ours, ere we in our waywardness
and wilfulness turned aside. Lord, we are like
foolish children who would be women and men,
and so wander from home, thinking of their
own puny strength to battle with, and to
conquer the world.
" But when, bleeding and faint, and by the
world cruelly mistreated, they would crawl
home again were it only to die too often
they have wandered so far that they can find
no way back. And we, Lord, have wandered
so far from home and heaven and Thee, that
we stand alone in the world, orphaned even
of God.
" Thou knowest that we women have no
strength in ourselves. Alike in girlhood,
womanhood, wifehood, motherhood if only by
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Without a Child
our very woman's nature we, more even than
men, have constant need of Thee.
" Since to our human comprehension it is
not possible to picture what Thou art, Thou
permittest us to think of Thee as our Father,
perhaps because when we think of motherhood
we think most of love, when we think of father-
hood, we think of love allied to strength. Yet
know we well that even as Thou art incom-
prehensibly Three in One, and One in Three,
so art Thou mystically and incomprehensibly
Two in One, and One in Two.
" Thou art our Mother, no less than our
Father ; and sometimes to us women it seems
as if there were more of motherhood in God
than of aught else, as if only a woman could
understand the heart of God.
" We women carry our child long time under
our heart, even as Thou hast carried us next
to Thine.
" We women fashion our children of our
body, feed them with our own life, suckle them
at our breasts, even as Thou fashionest and
feedest and sucklest us. For their sake we
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yield ourselves, and gladly, to suffer, even as
Thou, O God of suffering, didst sorrow and
suffer upon the Cross for us.
" For them it may even be that we are called
upon to lay down our lives ; even as Thou,
Lord of Love, didst lay down Thy life for us.
" Because Thou didst lay down Thy life for
us, we ask Thee to forgive.
" Because Thou didst lay down Thy life for
us, we beseech Thee to show us Thy mercy.
" Because Thou didst lay down Thy life for
us, we beseech Thee to give us a child.
4 'God our Father, God our Mother, God
our Saviour, we beseech Thee to give us a
child."
And from that great assembly went up a cry
of sterile anguish, infinitely more terrible than
the cry of a woman in labour :
"God our Father, God our Mother, God
our Saviour, we beseech Thee to give us a
child."
296
VI
THE woman ceased as if strength had gone out
of her. The uplifted arms dropped like dead
weights and hung heavy and inert at her sides.
The head, which had been thrown back, so
that her face looked heavenward, slowly fell
forward over her breast. She stood there
rocking backwards and forwards monotonously,
weeping meanwhile, the very picture of despair.
And again the cry welled up to heaven :
"God our Father, God our Mother, God our
Saviour, we beseech Thee to give us a child."
And then, it seemed to me as if, unseen of
all, there stood among them One whose hands
and feet and side were wounded ; as if, unheard
of all, He spoke words that were like the
death-cry of a God :
" O sisters ! O daughters ! O children
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think ye that I, whom your every cry crucifies
afresh, have heard unheeded. Think ye there
is any sorrow of yours that I share not, and
may not share?
" Dear mothers who have looked on the
little dead face of the child that was so young,
and yet had seemed to have been part of your-
self, from all time ; the child whom perhaps ye
laid cold in his coffin, clad in the white gar-
ments you had worked to keep warm his tiny
body in the cot dear mothers, know ye not
that never woman mourned a little one gone,
but My heart brake at sight of her sorrow ?
" And you, dear daughters, dear childless
women, who desire and entreat the pangs of
travail, crying out ' Let this body of mine
endure a thousand fold the anguish, if only, ere
I die, I may clasp to my bosom, body of me,
blood of me, soul of me, a very child mine,
mine, mine, in this world, the next world, mine,
for ever and all time.'
"So have you spoken, many of you; but
think you that any of you have yearned for a
child of the body, as I, in the body, have
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yearned to call one single child My own, yet
may not, since every child in the world is
Mine ?
" Behold now, I who share your sorrow, as
no woman, be she mother, sister, daughter or
friend, has shared woman's sorrow before, I
kneel with you to intercede for you to the God
Who is My Father and yours."
Again, as of old time in the garden, He knelt
in prayer ; and as He prayed so terrible was
His agony that once again beads of a bloody
sweat stood out upon His brow.
Upon such awful sight God wrestling with
God in prayer it was not for human eyes to
look, and turning away, I fell with bowed head
and closed eyes to the ground. How long
I remained thus I know not, but suddenly
there came to me the sense of something un-
accustomed in the world. What meant this
new sweetness in the air, this strange stirring
as it were at the heart of old earth, this loosen-
ing as of bonds, this feeling as of gentle thaw
after iron months of frost?
Lifting my head, with open eyes I gazed
299
A World Without a Child
around. The Sacred Figure of the Saviour
was gone, but looking at the spot where He
had knelt, and where His tears had fallen,
I saw sweeter, surer pledge of God's forgive-
ness than the covenant bow the tender verdure
of new grass, the wonder of white flowers
abloom.
And as the breaking crest of a wave whitens
in the wind, so suddenly, in the sunshine,
I saw a living green break foam-like over the
brown and barren fields, and tip with emerald
fire the dead branches of bush and tree.
And by this sign men and women knew that
into a dying world new life had entered, unto
a dying race the promise of a child had come.
And to heaven went up a great cry :
"-Christ has pleaded,
God has pardoned."
And with that cry ringing anthem-wise in
my ears, I awoke from my dream of a world
without a child, to hear the sweet clamour of
a little voice calling " Father ! dear father ! " at
my door.
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.
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